


IDK, spooky stuff

by varnes



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: (sort of), F/M, Gen, M/M, buzzfeed unsolved au, losers be ghost huntin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-01-25 11:00:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 39,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21355168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/varnes/pseuds/varnes
Summary: “You’re a ghost hunter, aren’t you?” Georgie reminded him. “And he’s a ghost, or something. So obviously the police won’t find him, but you guys can, with all your equipment. You can find him and make the murders stop.”From the couch, Richie’s whole face was lit up with delight. That was always a bad sign.“I don’t know, Georgie,” Bill said, but before he could get the words all the way out, Richie was leaping up and yanking the phone out of his hand.“Murderous ghost circus performer, love it, love it,” he announced. “Georgiekins, say no more, not one word, we are absolutely going to come bust the shit out of this clown.”-Or: the quasi-BFU AU where Bill, Stan, Bev and Richie go to Derry to hunt a ghost. Featuring a one-armed boy out for revenge; a Tiny Smol hotel clerk who can't decide if he wants to fight Richie or marry him; The Hot Fireman From LA?!; a local librarian who just wants to read books to children in peace; and, of course, Pennywise the clown.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough & Beverly Marsh, Bill Denbrough/Stanley Uris, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 167
Kudos: 751





	1. ghoulfriends

**Author's Note:**

> It's Been [checks calendar] 4 Days Since Our Last Shenanigan

“Ghost! That’s a ghost for _sure_,” Richie said, pulling his hat down over his eyes even though Bill had told him at least nine hundred times not to, because it made him harder to shoot. “Look at his little hands, waving at us. He’s a friendly ghost and he wants to get weird with me. Finally. It’s all happening.”

Next to him, Stan gave him the kind of glare that had twice gotten them out of parking tickets. “First of all, it could not be clearer that that is a man outside hailing a taxi,” he said flatly. “Second of all, the ghosts do not want to have sex with you. Why do you think all the ghosts want to have sex with you.”

“Uhhh,” Richie said, raising his eyebrows and gesturing at himself. “Because I’m a fucking _stud_, Stanley.”

“A stud,” Stan repeated.

His brow was doing that little furrowing thing that Richie loved, that only happened when he was _really_ getting annoyed. Richie grinned. He couldn’t believe sometimes that he’d managed to make himself a job where he got to drag Stan around to dirty old buildings to hunt ghosts that Richie was only like, forty percent sure were real, and was contractually obligated to bother him the entire time. _People like it, Stan,_ Bev had told them the first time one of their episodes went viral. _They think you guys are cute. Some of them even think you should date._

_Please don’t be gross, Beverly_, Stan had muttered, which was offensive, but whatever. Richie would forgive him for not wanting to hit it because Stan had terrible taste in paramours, which meant that honestly, him not wanting to date Richie was a compliment. 

Behind the camera, Bev poked her head out and gave Richie a thumbs up. She liked The Brow Furrow, too. She said every time they got a good brow furrow it bought them a thousand views, so fuck off, Helen of Troy. They sometimes played a game on shoots where they tried to see who could get it to come out first. Usually they made it about ten minutes before Bill caught on and put a stop to it, because everyone knew that Stan was Bill’s favorite, even during the periods when he was literally dating Bev. 

Richie magnanimously did not mind this, because he was _Stan’s_ favorite, and that’s what mattered. Also, Stan had a Christmas stocking at Richie’s parents’ house, even though Stan would rather die than admit that he cried the first year Richie’s mom gave it to him. It said _Stanley_ and had dreidels all over it. So basically, Stan was Richie’s for life.

“At least that’s what your mom said when I saw her at Rosh Hashanah last year,” said Richie, just to be an asshole. “Shanah tovah, bitch.”

“What she said was _schmuck_, actually,” Stan corrected him. He scrubbed furiously at his forehead. Richie loved when he scrubs at his forehead, it means he’s Big Mad. “Which is a Jewish mom’s way of saying you’re a dick, so.” 

Richie waved sadly at the not-a-ghost, who waved in bewilderment back and then indeed get into a taxi. Richie was beginning to thing this bar wasn’t even haunted. 

“I thought that was a shandafor.”

“Shanda what?”

“You know, that thing your mom said to you when we went viral the first time after college and you had to explain to your grandmother what your job was.”

“Ah,” said Stan. “_A shanda fur die goyim_. And no, it doesn’t mean that my mother thinks I’m a dick, it means my mother thinks that I have shamed the Jewish people before the non-Jews and now they’ll think all Jews are Like That.”

Bev made a delighted shouting sound and Richie laughed so hard he had to sit down on one of the cobwebby barstools. Even Bill had to move his head from the viewfinder and press his hands into his eyeballs, shoulders shaking. 

“Guys, stop laughing,” Stan commanded them. “This is why we never catch any ghosts. You don’t take it seriously.”

“That’s not true,” protested Bev, grinning. “Bill takes it seriously.”

Bill was, at that moment, burying his face in his sweatshirt. Richie didn’t even think the camera was pointed at anything. This whole episode was going to be a mess.

Of course, that was pretty much what made_ Get In _work: Stan was so cute and serious and scientific about everything, and Richie was determined to get tongued by a ghost. He’d accept a demon or a ghoul, but he really had his eyes on the prize of a ghost. Hopefully a sexy Victorian one. 

“Guys, sound off in the comments if you think Stan’s mom thinks he’s a dick,” Richie said, and Bill yelled, “Cut!”

-

_Get In, Loser_ started as mostly a joke. Stan took a film production class as an elective his senior year, to satisfy his art requirement, and at the end of the semester they had to create a short documentary. Richie, who’d been balls deep in liberal arts bullshit since they’d arrived on campus in his mom’s shitty old station wagon, had obviously volunteered himself to participate as, as he refused to stop calling it, _the talent_. He’d roped in Bev, from his improv club, to hold the boom, and she’d brought her boyfriend, Bill, who it turned out was a year older and a production assistant at the local news channel and had access to all the good equipment. 

They’d decided to investigate the supposedly haunted alumni house, but Richie refused to be on camera alone because he “needed a scene partner,” and so Stan had begrudgingly gone to stand next to him and mutter about how ghosts weren’t real. They’d gotten the name from a bit early in the video of Richie pulling up on a two-person electric scooter and saying, _Get in, loser, we’re going ghost hunting. _Watching them jointly scoot away had made Bill laugh so hard the camera shook. 

He’d turned in the video and kind of forgotten about it, and then the videos went on the school’s YouTube channel, and then — honestly, to this day, Stan doesn’t know why it did so well. But they’d put up a couple more, just for kicks, investigating a graveyard and then this creepy abandoned cabin upstate that supposedly was home to a Civil War serial killer. Stan ... got kind of into it.

He was kind of neutral on the idea of ghosts, actually; he’d never seen one, but the world was so goddamned weird. Who could say definitely that anything was or wasn’t real? All of existence might be a hallucination for all he knew. But if they were going to hunt ghosts he wanted to really _do_ it, scientifically, methodically. They were either going to definitively prove ghosts exist or they were going to definitively prove a place didn’t have any. He didn’t want to just sit around and talk about how they got goosebumps because of the “weird energy,” or whatever.

Anyway, after graduation they’d moved out to LA to try to make it work: him, Richie, Bev, and Bill, a shoestring budget and thousands of hours of road-tripping out to locations because they couldn’t afford to fly. And it _did_, actually, sort of: they had fans. They got views. They sold _merch._ Stan’s mother told her friends he worked “out in Hollywood,” and left out the part where he was the on-screen talent for a web show about never finding any ghosts.

His error, Stan determined upon opening the door to his home, was that he had, in an act of what could only be described as surely the beginnings of early onset dementia, agreed to let Bev live in their apartment. He managed Richie just fine, and had done so since they were in kindergarten; how bad could adding Bev to the mix be? For the sake of the show? For the sake of all their jobs, surely Stan could live with two of his three best friends with very little incident.

This was, he saw now, a miscalculation. His math had been wrong, which was rare for Stan, who’d gone to school with every intention of becoming an accountant. But he had not considered that he would be living not with Bev’s chaos and Richie’s chaos, but Bev-and-Richie’s chaos, combined.

“Well,” said Stan, standing in the doorway with one hand on the knob and pulling up his shirt to cover his mouth and protect his lungs from the billowing smoke, “I can see that we are going to break our four-day streak of not needing to call the fire department.”

Somewhere in the apartment, obscured, Bev’s voice muttered, “Richie did it.”

“Sell out! Hussy!” Richie cried, affronted. “I did not!”

“Yes you did, you wanted to see the hot fireman!”

“_You _wanted to see the hot fireman!”

“Well, _you’re _the one who — ”

Stan held up a silencing hand, for all the good it would do him, what with the smoke. “Did either of you geniuses think to open a window before you die of smoke inhalation?” he asked, and the answering quiet was enough. He sighed, moving in and shoving past Richie’s outline to find the window, pushing it open. The smoke immediately began to clear, revealing Bev to be half-perched over one of Richie’s shoulders, half-balanced on the arm of the couch. They were both covered in popcorn and gripping unequal halves of a broken bag.

Bev climbed down off of Richie and the couch. She popped a piece of badly burnt popcorn into her mouth and then winced. “Blech,” she announced.

“Yeah, you’re not usually supposed to burn them,” Stan told her dryly. “Also, don’t eat the burn stuff, it gives you cancer.”

“The burn stuff gives you _cancer?_” Richie gasped. “Bev, quick, call Make-A-Wish, I ate like forty of them off the floor and I want Trash Mouth to play the Super Bowl.”

“You want to use your cancer wish to get your Smash Mouth cover band to play the _Super Bowl_?” Bev asked him, looking disgusted. “Why? You have three friends and none of us watch football.” 

Richie shrugged. “My dad watches football,” he explained. “And my cousin Rudy, whom I hate. That would show him.”

Bev looked for confirmation at Stan, who nodded. Rudy did watch football, and Richie did hate him. To be fair, Rudy sucked. When they were growing up in Schaumburg, he always used to try to steal Stan’s yarmulke and play keepaway with it. Richie had started keeping spares in his underwear drawer whenever their moms made them invite Rudy to their sleepovers.

He went into his room to grab his go bag from beside the door. When Bev had moved in they’d given her the back half of the living room and moved Richie into the bigger closet. Stan got to keep the actual bedroom because Stan was the only one of them who paid his rent on time. Bill insisted that Bev had been very punctual with her half before they broke up, but Stan suspected that Bev always trying to be on her best behavior with Bill was _why_ they broke up, a thing he did not tell Bill, because Stan wasn’t trying to break the fragile detente they’d reached for the good of the show. 

“Where are you going?” Richie asked when Stan reemerged, bag over his shoulder.

Stan gestured to the apartment, which was only slowly re-filling with breathable air. “I’m not sleeping here and getting smoke in my lungs,” he said. “I’m going to Bill’s.”

“We can’t go to _Bill’s_,” Bev protested. “He’s going to be so _disappointed_ in me.”

“_I’m_ disappointed in you,” Stan told her. “How come neither of you are worried about that?”

Richie made a fart sound. “Stan, babe, you have been disappointed in me since the day we met. I’d be more worried if you _weren’t_ giving me the patented Uris Mom Face.”

Stan pinched the bridge of his nose. His mom was right: he should have stayed in corporate America reconciling budgets and not let Richie convince him to move to LA to make a web series about hunting ghosts. So what that they’d managed a surprising degree of success? Stan was living in a one-bedroom apartment with two other people, and those people had set a record in the neighborhood for Most Times A Fire Truck Has Had To Come To Their Building. He got stopped in grocery stores sometimes by _fans_. Who wanted to _talk _to him. That was Stan’s worst nightmare, talking to strangers in a Trader Joe’s while he was trying to decide which frozen pizza to buy.

The only person in the whole world that Stan liked was Bill, and that’s where he was going. If Richie and Bev wanted to stay here and die of smoke inhalation, they were adults. They were allowed to do that.

He turned and walked out of the apartment. Midway down the hall, he heard Bev say, “Look, if we go, you gotta _promise_—”

“Yeah, yeah, I Am He Who Set The Fire, I wanted to see the hot fireman,” Richie agrees impatiently. “Grab your go bag, let’s move before Stan takes the car and leaves us here.”

-

Bill had gotten as far as Georgie saying, “Don’t freak out, but there’s going to be a murder,” before his door swung open. He yelled, chucking the phone at the intruder, only to hear Stan’s very distinct cry of, “Ahh!” and an unmistakable Beverly Marsh guffaw. As his heart slowed down, he took a moment to be bitter that Bev never guffawed with him. She was always — quieter, with Bill, for reasons he’d never quite been able to parse. It’s not like he didn’t _know _what her personality was like. It’s why he’d liked her so much in the first place.

Stan was rubbing grumpily at his forehead when he finally appeared, Bill’s phone in his other hand. Bill could kind of hear Georgie saying, “Bill? Bill? Is everything okay?”

“Bill is being kidnapped,” Richie said loudly to the phone.

“Oh, are you?” asked Georgie. “Bill?”

Bill put the phone back to his ear. _Sorry Stan,_ he mouthed. “I’m not being kidnapped,” he assured Georgie. “I have surprise guests. They startled me. What was that about a murder?”

Richie made an excited face, and Bev smiled briefly at him before shuffling inside, dropping her stuff by the door. Stan looked concerned, following the two others to the couch and letting himself get manhandled to one side so Richie could lie with his head in Stan’s lap and Bev could sit on the armrest because she never learned how to sit normally. 

“I think it’s going to be Pennywise,” Georgie said, and Bill paused.

“Pennywise ... the clown?” he asked, frowning. “Your imaginary friend from when you were a kid? You think your imaginary friend is going to start killing people?”

“He wasn’t my _imaginary_ _friend_,” Georgie protested. “He was real. He was the one who — he was _real. _And now he’s back. He has a paper boat like the one I lost when he took my arm.” 

Bill sighed. The doctors had said that Georgie’s hallucinations were his way of processing the trauma of nearly being murdered and losing his arm in the process; that they should treat them seriously and respectfully but not worry about or cater to them. And they’d gone away, Bill thought. As time went on. It had been six years.

“Georgie,” he said. “Have you told mom and dad that you’re seeing the clown again?”

The long answering pause was answer enough. “I’m not _seeing_ him, don’t say it like that,” Georgie muttered. “He’s back and he’s going to do it again, I _know_ it.”

“Georgie, they caught the man who hurt you,” Bill reminded him gently. “Henry Bowers is in jail and he’s going to stay there.”

“It wasn’t Henry Bowers! It only looked like him!”

Bill went to the fridge and got himself a beer. Bev made grabby hands at him when he looked up over the open door, so he got out three more and passed them out. Stan took his and opened it for him, because Stan as the best. He debated what to say. Georgie had been six when he was attacked; he was twelve now, and had never quite gotten back to the bouncy, cheerful kid he’d been. Bill supposed that was to be expected, but it had all happened while Bill was away, and he hadn’t been able to be there to help guide him back, and he felt ... he knew it wasn’t his _fault_, but if he’d been home instead of going so far away for college, maybe he’d have moved with the family to Maine, and Georgie wouldn’t have been alone, and maybe Bowers wouldn’t have —

“Look, Gee, I’m sorry that you’re ... it sounds like there’s a lot going on over there. Are you afraid? Do you want to come stay with me for a while?”

Bill lived in a one-bedroom apartment that really wasn’t equipped for a twelve-year-old, but now that Bev had moved out, at least there was more space. 

Bev was looking at him knowingly, and Bill turned his back so he couldn’t see it. He knew what she was going to say, which was that he wasn’t Georgie’s dad. But what did she want him to do? Leave his brother in Nowheresville, Maine to hallucinate murder clowns?

“No,” Georgie was saying, sounding grumpy. “They’re not gonna catch him, because he’s too smart. _You_ have to do it.”

Bill blinked. “What?” 

“You’re a ghost hunter, aren’t you?” Georgie reminded him. “And he’s a ghost, or something. So obviously the police won’t find him, but you guys can, with all your equipment. You can find him and make the murders stop.”

From the couch, Richie’s whole face was lit up with delight. That was always a bad sign. 

“I don’t know, Georgie,” Bill said, but before he could get the words all the way out, Richie was leaping up and yanking the phone out of his hand.

“A _murder clown_, you say?” Richie asked into the phone. “Hiya, Georgie, it’s me, Richie, from the show. We met once before but you were just a teeny tiny little beanie baby at the time, so you may not remember me. What? Oh, you were ten? Well, how old is ten, really? I don’t know, you all look the same to me until you hit puberty. Have you hit puberty yet?”

“Gross,” said Georgie.

“Well, there you go. Anyway, enough talk about your body and its changes, let’s talk about ghosts. There’s a ghost in your town? And it’s killing people?”

“Well, it’s a clown,” Georgie said, but Bill could practically _hear_ him getting his hopes up. God, they were definitely going to have to go to Derry fucking Maine and ghost hunt his brother’s imaginary friend. Bill was going to have to tell his parents that he and Bev broke up. He groaned and flopped down onto the couch; Stan patted his knee comfortingly. “And I don’t know if he’s a ghost exactly but he’s definitely evil and he eats people.” 

Richie was nodding furiously. “Murderous ghost circus performer, love it, _love it_,” he announced. “Georgiekins, say no more, not one word, we are abso_lutely_ going to come bust the _shit_ out of this clown.” 

Bill threw a shoe at him. “Don’t swear, he’s _twelve_,” he hissed.

“Bill, he knows about swear words,” Richie returned drolly. “Georgie, what’s your favorite swear? It’s okay, you can tell me, I won’t narc you out to your parents.”

“Georgie, don’t,” called Bill.

Georgie said, “Fuck.”

“_Georgie!_”

“Let Georgie say fuck!” Richie cried triumphantly, and then, in his terrible British accent, “Good boy, King Georgie the Fourth. Or should I say King George the Fuck?”

Stan snatched the phone from Richie’s hand. “Bye, Georgie,” he said gently into it. “Nice to talk to you. Bill says bye and he loves you.”

“Bye Bill, I love you,” Georgie shouted, to make sure Bill could hear him. 

Stan hung up the phone. Bill groaned again, knocking his head a few times against the back of the couch. “You guys don’t have to come,” he said. “I can go to Derry and walk around and not find my brother’s fake ghost friend and come back.”

Bev patted his shoulder comfortingly. “If you think there’s any chance in hell we are going to prevent Richie from trying to track down a murder clown, you are definitely lost in the sauce,” she told him sympathetically. 

“One b-b-beer is hardly ‘the sauce,’” Bill protested. 

Stan lolled his head to look at him. “How many beers in a sauce?” he asked. “Four? Ten?”

“Ten beers is nothing to Big Bill,” Richie dismissed. “Remember that time senior year where he did a ten-minute keg stand?”

“It’s the height,” Bev agreed. “It’s fourteen, at least. Fourteen beers per sauce.”

“If he drank fourteen beers he would die,” Stan told them flatly, and then pointed at Richie. “_No_ we are not going to try it.”

Honestly, Bill wouldn’t mind fourteen beers. Bill wouldn’t mind four hundred beers, if it could get him out of thinking about his little brother is maybe going a little crazy in the town of Derry, Maine, where Bill is going to have to go now, and like, talk to his parents. Oh, God, they’re probably going to make him do a family dinner. His dad is going to do that thing where he asks about the show in the same tone of voice he uses to ask about family members who are dying of cancer. 

“C’mon, Mom, let Dad drink fourteen beers,” Richie wheedled. 

Beside him, Bev gently nudged Bill’s shoulder. “You okay?” she asked quietly. “Georgie okay? I heard that stutter, you can’t hide from me.”

The worst thing about Bev was that she was a good friend, even now, when things hadn’t quite gotten over being awkward. Bill couldn’t figure out how to _make_ them not be awkward. He loved her. She was still one of his favorite people in the world. But she’d never figured out a way to be able to just be herself when they were together, not when it was just the two of them. It was like she kept trying to be this person she thought Bill wanted her to be, when in fact the person Bill wanted her to be was herself.

Bev had always been good with Georgie. The first time Bill brought her home, not long after they started dating in college, Georgie had demanded she read him a bedtime story every night. Bill thought that he probably had this idea in his head that Bev and Bill would get married and move back to Derry. Georgie kind of thought that Derry was where people went when they were ready to Settle Down, because it’s where his parents went to be retired. 

“He’s gonna be disappointed,” Bill muttered. “Both when we don’t find the ghost and ... you know. When we tell him.” 

Bev smiled a little. “He’s going to be so happy to see you, he won’t care,” she assured him. 

“But my _mom_,” he whined. “The only thing she liked about me moving out here was that I was moving out here with you.”

“Tell her you’re dating Stan now,” Richie suggested, grinning. He took Stan’s chin between his thumb and forefinger and turned it in Bill’s direction. Stan’s flat expression did not change; he looked resigned. That made sense, he supposed; he’d been dealing with Richie since they were practically in the womb. He had to be used to it by now. “Look at that handsome face. Look at that responsible, handsome, Jewish face.”

Stan blinked. “I ... think that’s anti-Semitic? What’s Jewish about my face?”

Riche frowned at him, turning his chin again so that Stan could meet his eyes. “Well, it’s your face, and you’re Jewish,” he said. “Ipso facto: Jewish face. Doesn’t everybody want a nice Jewish boyfriend? You guys make the best food and all of your holidays are like: you tried to kill us and you failed, so suck my dick, bitch.” 

Stan considered this. “To be fair, that _is_ what most of our holidays are like,” he acquiesced. 

“Gosh, Rich, maybe _you_ should date him,” Bev suggested. “Since you like his face so much.”

Richie dragged Stan forward and attempted to kiss him; Stan wriggled out of his grip, flapping his hands and pushing Richie away. “Abso_lutely_ not,” Stan cried. “I know where that mouth has been! I once saw you eat gum you found stuck to a table at a restaurant!”

“Everyone knows germs can’t stick to gum,” Richie said, rolling his eyes. 

“Oh,_ Richie_,” said Bill.

Bev kicked her feet out, sliding down the armrest onto the couch cushion. She draped her legs over Bill and Stan. “So are we going to Derry or not?” she asked. “Because if we are, I’m gonna need a lot more stuff from the apartment than just my go bag.”

Bill realized suddenly that they did indeed all have their go bags. “Wait,” he said. “Why _are_ you guys here?”

Richie and Bev exchanged a look, and then said at once, “Stan set a bag of popcorn on fire?”

“So help me,” said Stan, “I will turn this car around.” 

-

Bev refused to drive to Derry, because it would take eight hundred hours, and she loved her boys desperately but also she’d _been_ on a roadtrip with them before and she knew it was only a few stops worth of gas station food before they all reverted to being thirteen and extremely liberal with their farts. Bev could fart as good as any of them, but she really wasn’t trying to be _trapped in a car_ with it. 

Anyway, they’d recently done an episode sponsored by a Halloween store in downtown LA, so they had a little extra cash than usual, and they let Bev be in charge of the cash because she’d been emancipated at sixteen and was the only one of them with halfway decent credit. 

Well, Stan’s was good, but if they let Stan be the one with the credit card he’d be _such_ an accountant about it, which was something Richie had said as a joke but Bev thought he probably meant. It was true that if they gave Stan something to worry about he’d worry himself into the ground, so Bev had the credit card, and Stan focused on editing and being good on camera. He was good at editing, at finding all the right jump cuts and adding the right music. Bev was better at directing, because she was better in the moment than when she put too much thought into it. And of course nobody was better than Bill at the extremely boring job of being a producer. 

Well, _Bev_ thought it was boring. _You think _I’m_ boring,_ Bill had said the night they broke up. _That’s why you’re always so fucking n-n-nice to me!_

It was kind of a hurtful thing to say, actually, but. It was true that Bev was nicer to Bill than she was anyone else. It’s just — she didn’t think he was boring. She thought he was _wonderful_. He was kind and he was thoughtful and he loved his brother and he took care of Bev and she just, like, the thing was that Bev knew that in her heart she was just a little racoon garbage queen, and Bill deserved — someone else. Someone who could, like, cook. And wanted kids. And didn’t still masturbate to seventies porn because she was literally gross enough to kind of be into the mustaches. 

Anyway: Bev’s point was, they flew to Bangor and drove from there. It was a pretty drive. Maine was pretty, generally, except in the bits that looked like they were straight out of, like, a horror movie. Bill got more and more tense the closer they got, which Stan obviously noticed and Richie obviously didn’t, distracted as he was by singing along to All Star by Smash Mouth.

“Do you know where the name Trash Mouth came from?” Stan asked the car at large.

“It rhymes with Smash Mouth,” Richie said, glaring at him. “That’s why.”

Stan grinned. “It’s what Cousin Rudy used to call him,” he corrected. “Because Richie talked so much shit all the time.”

“HEY NOW, YOU’RE AN ALL STAR, GET YOUR GAME ON, GO PLAY,” Richie bellowed, as if it would keep Bev and Bill from hearing.

Bev cackled. “Trash Mouth Tozier!” she cried. “I’m definitely only calling you that from now on. I’m going to change your Twitter handle.”

“You don’t know my password,” Richie sniffed.

“SMD6969,” Bev drawled. “Come on. You think I don’t have all you losers’ passwords? You think I couldn’t walk away with all your identities right now?”

Stan reached out to turn down the radio. “I have absolutely no doubt that you _could_, but good God why would you want any of our identities?” he pointed out. “Richie’s alone will get you thrown in jail. Also, none of us have any money.”

“Bill has money,” Bev said. “Bill has a _trust fund._”

“It’s got, like, nine dollars in it,” Bill clarified. “Thank you, college.”

Richie perked up. “Bill, forget Stan, date me instead. Fly me around the world with your fancy inheritance money.”

“I’m telling you, there’s none _left_,” Bill said, sounding stressed. “Marry Georgie. He hasn’t spent his yet.” He paused. “Actually, definitely don’t do that. Very gross. I wish I hadn’t said it out loud, now I have to live with it forever.”

He slowed down as they passed a sign that read DERRY WELCOMES YOU. It was worn at the edges, and almost weirdly ... spooky. Bev couldn’t put her finger on why. 

Richie tossed a two-fingered salute at the sign. “And we welcome you right back, Mr Derry, sir,” he announced. “Oh, man, I hope this ghost is real. I hope I finally get to fingerbang a ghost and it’s a fucking _clown_, that would be — honestly just _so_ funny.” He made a chef’s kiss. “Season finale, baby. Our views would go through the _roof_.” 

He held his hand up for a high-five, and Stan calmly pulled it back down by his wrist without taking his eyes from the road. 

“How much of Richie fingerbanging a clown-ghost do you think we’d be able to slip past YouTube’s content filters?” Bev wondered. “Like, it would probably depend on whether it showed up on camera, right? If it was just Richie basically _simulating_ — ”

“I will give you five hundred dollars, right now, to stop,” said Bill. “Five hundred. Cash.”

“Old Money Bill Denbrough,” chimed in Richie, looking pleased. “I will take your five hundred and never talk about fingerbanging a clown again.”

“No, you absolutely _must_ talk about it on camera,” Bev scolded. “Richie, you _know_ the viewers love it when you get weird and sexual about the ghosts. They say you’ve got that consumptive Victorian heroine thing going on and it gets them all excited.”

“I’m not a piece of _meat_, Beverly,” Richie said. “I’m a _person_ with _feelings._”

“You’re nothing to me but my meal ticket, baby,” Bev returned, grinning at him. 

Bill pulled the car into a driveway and put it in park. The four of them stopped bickering and turned to look at the house, which was big and perfectly manicured. Bev was the only one of them who had been there before; it was kind of eerie how ... completely unchanged the house always was. Like time didn’t touch it. Like the Denbroughs were completely stuck in the bubble of the first few months in Derry, before Georgie’s accident, when everything was still perfect. 

The front door opened, and Georgie came running out. 

His t-shirt sleeve was tied in a knot on the side where his arm was missing; Bev knew he had a prosthetic but he didn’t like to wear it, for reasons Bev hadn’t been able to suss out of him the last time she was here.

“BILL!” Georgie cried. Bill turned off the engine and got out of the car, grinning broadly, stress melting from his shoulders as Georgie flung himself into his open arms. “You’re here! You came!”

“I said I would, bud,” Bill reminded him. “And look who I got with me.”

He jerked his head back to the car and Bev got out, grinning at Georgie and giving him a little wave. He beamed at her, cheeks pinking up. She thought it was cute that he still had a crush on her. The first time she’d met him, when he was only about seven, he’d asked if she would marry him instead of Bill. Bev had said yes.

“Hello, future husband,” she greeted him now, like she always did. “You are looking very handsome and irresistible today.”

Georgie’s blush deepened as Richie and Stan clambered out of the car. “Why, this couldn’t be Georgie,” Richie said, giving an exaggerated frown. “The Georgie I remember was like, two feet tall and very boring. _This_ Georgie is basically a grown up and seems dope as fuck.”

“_Richie_,” Bill hissed.

“What?” asked Richie. “It’s his favorite swear word, he told me.”

Bill’s mother emerged at the top of the steps, one hand on the door. She looked impeccable, like she always looked. Bev found her to be the most intimidating person she’d ever met, and she even knew that Mrs. Denbrough _liked_ her. 

“Hello, Bill,” she greeted. “Welcome home.”

“Thanks, mom,” Bill said, tensing up again. “G-g-good to see you.” 

“Are you going to introduce your friends?”

Bill blinked, then gave his head a little shake and smiled sheepishly. “Uh, yeah, sorry. Obviously you know B-Bev” — Bev gave a cheerful wave — “and this is, is, is Richie Tozier, and ... uh, Stan. Uris.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” said Stan, politely.

“Hi, Mrs. D,” greeted Richie. “Bill didn’t tell me his mom was smokin’ hot.”

Mrs. Denbrough blinked at him, looking completely taken aback. Bev fought the urge to clap her hand over her mouth and instead looked down at the pavement to hide her smile. 

“... Thank you,” Mrs. Denbrough said at last. “It is nice to meet you both. Lovely to see you, Beverly.” 

“Always a pleasure, Mrs. Denbrough,” said Bev politely. “Thank you so much for having us. I promise we won’t be a bother.”

Bill’s mom smiled, a little tightly, and then disappeared back into the house.

Richie gave a low whistle. “Ice ice baby, dun dun dun dun-a-lun-dun,” he sang.

Stan punched him on the arm, hard. “Beep fucking _beep_, Richie,” he hissed, then froze, glancing at Georgie, and then Bill. “Sorry.”

Bill just gave a resigned shake of his head and detangled himself from Georgie, going to get his bag from the back of the car. “I’ll drop my stuff off and then take you guys to the hotel,” he said. “Now you see why I didn’t think everyone staying here was a good idea.” 

“No dibs on the cot,” Richie called.

“You and Stan can cuddle,” Bev told him. “And then nobody sleeps on the cot.”

“Why do _I_ have to cuddle with him?” Stan demanded. “I don’t want to cuddle with him. He’s like an octopus and his at-rest body temperature is a million degrees. He gives me the night sweats.”

“Fine, you can cuddle with _me_,” Bev allowed. “Richie can have his own bed.”

“Richie doesn’t deserve to be the one to get his own bed!” Stan protested.

“Well _someone’s_ got to sleep with him then and it’s not going to be _me_,” Bev argued, and then Georgie asked, “How come you’re not staying with Bill?”

Bev’s head jerked up to look at Bill. He didn’t meeting her eyes, very focused suddenly on adjusting the straps of his backpack.

He hadn’t told them. He _hadn’t told them._

“Uh,” said Bev. “Well, Georgie ... the thing is ... Bill and I ...”

She trailed off helplessly, and was saved only by Richie saying suddenly: “It’s their sexual chemistry, King George. It’s explosive. It messes with the ghost hunting because all the ghosts just float around them with hearts in their eyes singing that wedding song.” 

“What wedding song?” Georgie asked.

“You know the one,” said Richie. “It’s a banger. It’s like, du-du-du-duuuuunnnn, du-DU-du-duuuun. It plays while the bride is coming.” 

“Here Comes The Bride,” supplied Stan, looking pained. “Literally the most famous song in the wedding ouvre, and named for _what happens while it plays_.”

Richie snapped his fingers. “That’s the one! Here Comes The Bride. The ghosts can’t get enough of it. If you knew how many times we had to pull Bev out of a haunted house because some dead old colonial lady was trying to get her a wedding veil.”

Georgie laughed, and Bev shot Richie a look that was gratitude mixed with horror, because on the one hand she now didn’t have to explain to the world’s cutest eleven-year-old that she’d broken up with his brother, and on the other hand, she now had to lie to that eleven-year-old about having _not_ broken up with his brother.

Bill was obviously wincing, but managed a smile for Georgie. “Yeah, well, uh, I should get these guys to the hotel.”

“You know what,” said Bev, giving Bill her best glare, “why don’t you stay here and get settled? Give me the keys, I’ll drive us to the hotel. We can meet up after you’ve had a chance to catch up with your folks.”

Bill quelled a little under her look and meekly held out the keys. “I don’t mind coming with,” he said, a little desperately.

Bev’s smile could have cut glass. “Oh, that’s okay, Bill, my _dearest_ love,” she said. “Wouldn’t want you to miss out on this special time with your family.”

“Yikes!” mumbled Richie under his breath.

Stan plucked the keys from Beverly’s hand. “Okay, everyone in the car, now,” he said. “Georgie, great to see you. Bill, we’ll check into the hotel and unpack a little and then we can rendezvous later, maybe after dinner?” 

“G-great,” said Bill, in a strangled voice that suggested he’d rather pull out all his own teeth than have one family dinner. 

Bev softened a little. She got it, actually; her mom was dead and she didn’t have a relationship with her dad, but she remembered what it had been like, when she did. How she’d have done anything to convince him that her life was perfect, that she was perfect. How she’d have done anything to convince her_self_ of the same thing. 

Feeling bad, she crossed the front of the car and pressed a kiss to Bill’s cheek, giving his shoulder a squeeze. “You’re going to be fine,” she whispered into his ear, and then, louder, for Georgie’s benefit, “Love you, see you soon.” She gave Georgie a wink and a wave, and hopped into the passenger side of the car. Richie was stretched out along the backseat. 

Stan backed them slowly and carefully out of the driveway, and when Bev glanced back, Bill was still standing there, watching them go.

-

The hotel was, in a word, horrific. It looked like the set of a 1980s horror movie. It looked like they were all going to get brutally murdered in the beds, probably while having sex with a townies. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since it was built.

Richie fucking _loved_ it. If ever a ghost existed on earth, it was going to exist here, in this creepy little Stepford town. Richie had never liked clowns particularly, but he was absolutely willing to make out with on camera. Probably, for Georgie’s sake, he wouldn’t do any of the good sex stuff. He didn’t want to scar the kid more than he already was.

Richie glanced around, worried suddenly that Bev or Stanley might have somehow read his thoughts and heard that joke. He didn’t want to get hit, and they’d definitely hit him.

But Bev and Stan were unpacking, blithely ignoring Richie’s thoughts. Which he felt was very polite of them. 

He dumped his entire suitcase into his designated drawer and then walked out to explore. He wanted to pick the best room to get murdered in. It definitely wasn’t their hotel room, that was too obvious. He was hoping there was like, a spooky lounge somewhere. If Richie was gonna die on camera he wanted it to be while he was wearing a sexy robe in a weird lounge. That would be the absolute best way to go.

At the front desk, which Richie had not seen when they checked in because Stan had handled it while he and Bev carted all the camera stuff from the car, there was a short-ish man with a close haircut and a very sharp jaw. He wear wearing a polo shirt and glaring at the computer. 

_Cute_, Richie thought, unbidden. _Cute, cute, cute._

He cleared his throat, and the man looked up. His nametag read _Eddie_. He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?” he asked. “What’s up?”

“I wondered,” Richie said, “whether or not you had a spooky lounge somewhere.”

Eddie blinked at him. “A spooky lounge,” he repeated.

“Yes. Like a regular lounge, but spookier. Like somewhere that if someone were to get murdered, people who found his body would be like, well, fucking obviously this guy got murdered, look at how spooky this lounge is.”

“If you’re going to try to make your suicide look like a murder in my hotel, don’t,” the man told him, flatly. “Do you have _any_ idea how expensive that would be for me, insurance-wise? No. We’re not doing that. Go get fake murdered somewhere else.” 

Richie was absolutely overtaken by a sensation of delight. He hadn’t felt this delighted since the first time he met Bev, in improv club, when they did their first scene together and the first thing she said to him was, _Holy shit, you’re Ass Mouth Man!_ and Richie had had to do the entire scene using his butt to speak, like Ace Ventura. 

“But I want to get fake murdered _here_,” he stressed. “In what is clearly a hotbed venue for destination murders.”

“Excuse me?” asked Eddie, looking affronted. “Fuck you. This is a very nice hotel.”

“Buddy, this hotel looks like the set from Friday the Thirteenth.”

“Okay, first of all, that took place at a summer camp, so try again, asshole.” 

“Nightmare on Elm Street?”

“Suburbia. Could not more famously have taken place in suburbia. The whole film was a fucking _metaphor _for suburban repression, okay, and I don’t even have time to — have you ever even_ seen_ a horror movie? Have you literally ever even seen one horror movie.”

“Yeah, I saw _Swan Princess_ when I was eleven,” said Richie, just to fuck with him. He didn’t know why but he wanted to make this tiny little hotel clerk so mad that his heart explodes. “Nightmares for weeks.”

Eddie snorted. “Fuck _off_, Swan Princess gave you nightmares,” he said. “You’ve never seen Swan Princess in your life. Name one character.”

Richie put on his best-worst French accent to say: “Jean motherfucking Bob, uhhh, how you say, bitch.”

Eddie barked a laugh, and finally took his hands off the keyboard to give Richie his full attention, which felt weirdly like winning a prize. “All right,” he said. “You’ve seen it. But I’ll bet it didn’t give you nightmares. I’ll bet you watched it every day for weeks, furiously masturbating to Odette.”

“_Evil_ Odette, maybe,” Richie said, because fair play to Eddie, that was true. Although it had really been more about—he’s not proud—Lord Rogers. What could he say? Richie loved a snarky bitch.

“Okay, so, her name was Brigitte, and you should show her some fucking respect,” commanded Eddie. “Dude, who even _are_ you? Why the fuck are you in _Derry_?”

Richie hauled himself up to sit on the counter, and refused to let Eddie push him off. “I am here to hunt a ghost,” he announced loftily. “I heard there’s a ghost that needs busting and I am the world’s foremost, number-one-certified ghost pussy — or bussy! — hunter.” 

Eddie stared at him for a full thirty seconds. Have you ever been stared at for thirty seconds? It was a long fucking time. 

“Sorry,” Eddie said slowly, “I’m sorry, but _surely _you did not come to Derry, out of nowhere, to _my_ hotel, climb up on my counter like some sort of Moulin Rouge French go-go dancer, and say the words _ghost bussy_.”

“I’m Richie,” Richie said, beaming. He held out a hand. “Richie Tozier.”

“Get the fuck out of my hotel, Richie Tozier,” said Eddie, but he shook Richie’s hand, which was how Richie knew both that he didn’t mean it and that Richie was in big, _big _trouble.

-

Stan didn’t follow Richie out when he went to “scout murder locations” for two reasons. First, because Richie was always claiming he was either going to fuck a ghost or get murdered by one, and it had stopped having any impact on Stan at all. And second, he knew Richie liked a little alone time when they got on location, to get a feel for the energy so he could calibrate himself on camera.

Richie was, unfortunately, actually really good at his job, which had surprised everybody but Stan, who’d known him long enough to know that all Richie’s bluster was just a sleight of hand. 

“So who are you snuggling with tonight, Manly Stanley? Me or the trash mouth?”

Stan felt a twinge of guilt. “He hated that nickname,” he admitted. “I shouldn’t have told you guys.” 

Bev gave him a very soft look. “Aw, dummy,” she said. “If you baby him about it he’ll hate it more, you know that.” 

Stan did know that. “Still,” he said.

“_Still_,” Bev mimicked. “Oh, wanna see what’s on TV? Or we can get your solo talking head out of the way while Richie is gone.”

Stan shrugged. He chewed his lip for a minute and then sat down on the bed, trying to figure out how to say it. He hadn’t told Richie because Richie was going to be mad, no matter how Stan sliced it, and he hadn’t told Bill because — well, because he teased Richie and Bev about it but they were right: disappointing Bill was the worst. 

But Bev would understand. Bev always evolved to fit the energy in any room, which meant she and Richie were a nightmare together but with Stan she was always softer, calmer. Like she was absorbing and dissolving Stan’s admittedly sometimes manic anxiety.

“Bev,” he said slowly, “I, uh. The thing is, I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh, no,” said Bev, “Stan. We have talked about this. You should never think about anything, ever. It’s bad for you.”

“I know this,” Stan agreed dryly. He rubbed his hands against his thighs, and Bev’s eyebrows rose. She sat down across from him on the other bed, clearly ready to take him seriously. “Okay. It’s ... look, don’t freak out and _don’t _tell the others.”

Bev mimed zipping her lips, and waited. Richie would have tried to help him find his words and Bill would have given him that expectant, Active Listening look that Stan _knows_ he learned from basically raising Georgie, but Bev just waited, calm as anything.

And the thing was, he just — he loved the show, he _loved _the show, he just — he didn’t — 

“I don’t want to be on camera any more,” Stan blurted finally. “I hate it. I hate doing it and I hate when strangers talk to me and I hate that there’s that whole contingent of fans who are, like, who think I’m dating Richie and _ask_ me about it, and at the cons people always want to take photos and I _hate_ photos and I — ”

Bev held up her hands. “Okay, easy, tiger,” she cut him off, mercifully. “Close those big ol’ nightmare castle doors. It’s fine. Stan, my sweet idiot boy, of course it’s fine. We’ll figure something out. Maybe we can hire someone.” 

“With what money?” Stan asked miserably. “We can’t afford to split it more. It’s — if we want to keep doing it, Richie is gonna have to be on camera alone, and _that’s_ not going to work because the whole reason the show is good is the — [the _dynamic_](https://the-niche.blog/2018/03/23/what-is-the-dynamic-anyway/). Sweaterboy and Absolute Disaster. They put us on the _website_. We sell it as _merch_. Richie made us wear them at VidCon last year.”

Bev snorted. “It is true that I don’t think anyone watching cares if we ever actually catch a ghost,” she acknowledged. “Do you ... still want to be a _part_ of the show?”

“I like editing,” Stan mumbled. He felt _so_ guilty. He knew it wasn’t as simple as swapping someone else in for him; he knew a change of this size could sink the show, no matter how hard they tried to keep their audience. It wasn’t just about what _Stan_ wanted, it was about what the _audience_ wanted, and they wanted Stan and Richie to bitch at each other in various creepy locations. “I really like doing the actual ... _work_ of making stuff. I just.” He scrubbed his forehead. “Richie is going to be mad. Bev, he’s gonna be so mad, and he’s—”

He was Richie. He was Stan’s ... _Richie._

“Well, Richie can get over it,” Bev said on a shrug. “If we let that drama queen’s high octane emotions dictate the behavior of this team we would have Thelma and Louise’d the van off a cliff, like, _years _ago.”

“Two days ago I had to convince you not to free climb the Aon Center,” Stan pointed out. “You said, and I quote, ‘Alex Honnold can suck my dick.’”

Bev grinned. “Look, we’re all works in progress,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss Stan hard on the forehead. “I won’t say anything. But it’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure it out.”

Stan had been telling himself for months that it was going to be okay, but it wasn’t until Bev pressed her lips to his forehead that he thought that actually, maybe it was. Stan probably couldn’t make it okay, but Bev could, because Bev could do anything. Stan tended to think of himself as a realist about people, but with Bev it was different, because he’d once seen Bev leap off a cliff without ever looking down, not even once. She’d taken a running start and looked up at the clouds and Stan would have sworn that for one second, just the one where she leapt, he’d have believed she was going to fly.

-

“So here we are, in the quaint little town of Derry, Maine,” the guy said, gesturing broadly to the street behind them. The guy filming him was half-stood on the library steps, one eye in the viewfinder of his camera. He’s come early this morning and scouted a couple of different locations, which Mike knew to look out for because Eddie had called him at six yesterday announced that a camera crew had come to Derry, and all of them were weird, but especially “the one that looks like you taped anime eyes on a dirty mop and made it dress up like my uncle Marvin during his Phish groupie days.” 

“Famous for literally nothing,” the guy who did indeed look like Eddie’s uncle Marv continued, which Mike thought was unfair because Derry was also known for its great cheese. “But folks, it’s about to pop off here because we have received intel that this sleepy dreamboat of a location is being haunted by a murderous cannibal ghost clown. And so we begin our continuing investigation into the question: is today the day that I get to ...” 

He trailed off, glancing at where little Georgie Denbrough was standing next to the cameraman. Mike assumed that must have been Bill, his brother; they’d met a couple of times years ago, after Mike had found Georgie in the river on his way back to the farm, Henry Bowers standing over him. Eddie had thrown a rock and knocked Bowers hard enough to leave him laying dizzily in the water, and then Mike had carried Georgie’s small body all the way to the hospital. 

He didn’t like to think about it. 

Bill had taken a leave of absence from college to come back and help Georgie recover, if Mike remembered correctly. But they hadn’t ever really gotten that friendly, because Bill had rarely left Georgie’s side and Mike wasn’t really in the market for new friends. He had Eddie and, at the time, Ben. That had been plenty for a Derry boy whose only ambition was to become the local librarian.

Also, he’d felt weird about it, snowed under by the weight of Bill’s parents’ gratitude, by the intensity of the trial, by the way Henry Bowers are screamed that he’d been made to do it, by the way Mike had cleaned Georgie’s blood off his hands and when he looked up into the mirror he thought, for just a second, that he saw a clown.

“—to say it,” the red haired woman was saying. “Richie, you _always _say it.”

“Yeah but Georgie is _right there,_” the guy muttered. “I can’t say it in _front_ of _Georgie._”

“Yesterday you told him his brother had explosive sexual chemistry _and_ you made him say fuck,” the one in the yarmulke pointed out.

“I watch the show,” said little Georgie Dembrough, sounding annoyed. “And I _know_ what _fingerbanging_ is.”

“HEY NOW,” shouted Bill, and Mike decided it was probably time to interrupt. He pushed open the library doors and went out into the steps, giving the group a little wave.

Georgie beamed at him, darting up the steps to demand a high five, which Mike willingly gave. He liked Georgie, who hung out a lot at the library, alone. He didn’t have many friends, Mike didn’t think; whether it was because of his arm or the stigma of being the one to survive the murders or because he was just kind of a weird kid, Mike didn’t know. But he didn’t mind him being in the library. He was a good helper and he liked to shelve. 

He didn’t remember Mike carrying him, and Mike hadn’t ever said. 

Georgie turned and waved the group over. “Guys, this is Mike, he’s my best friend,” he announced. This was something of a surprise to Mike, but he smiled and reached out a hand for Bill to shake.

“Georgie is the official Derry library re-shelver,” he said seriously. “Fastest hand in town.”

Georgie blushed red, looking pleased. “That’s right,” he agreed. “Mike and me, we can shelf a hundred books in five minutes!”

Mike made a face to indicate to the group that they could not do that. He put his hand on the top of Georgie’s head and dragged him around a bit, keeping gentle enough that he didn’t lose his balance.

“You’re Bill, right?” Mike asked as Bill released him. “I think we met before, briefly.” His eyes darted to Georgie and away, and he watched recognition dawn in Bill’s eyes.

“Mike Hanlon,” he said. “You’re the one who — yeah. We met. It’s g-g-good to see you ag-gain.”

He gestured back at the three people standing behind him. They all looked about the same age, probably around where Mike was himself, but an odd group. The redhead, her hair in a long braid, was wearing an ACDC shirt and ripped jeans with combat boots; the Jewish one was wearing a sweater vest. The one Eddie had told him about truly looked like someone’s closet had thrown up on him, unruly curly hair fluffing out from his head with some degree of bounce. 

“This is Bev, Stan, and Richie,” Bill introduced. Mike wondered how often he stuttered; it seemed to come and go. “Guys, this is Mike Hanlon. You run the library now?”

“Youngest librarian in Derry history,” Mike confirmed, proud. “Took it over right after I finished my degree.”

“So you’re a nerd,” Richie diagnosed, and was promptly smacked by both Stan and Bill. Bev visibly hid a smile behind her hand. “Ow! What the fuck, I’m just saying. We love nerds, look at Stan. He’s wearing a sweater vest, for god’s sake. I had to _talk him_ _out _of a bow tie.”

“Oh, sorry I wanted to bring a shred of professionalism to this fucking show,” Stan birched back, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, ignore Richie, he’s an asshole. It’s nice to meet you, Mike. We, uh, we’re here because we run this web show — ”

“_Get In, Loser_,” Mike interrupted. “Georgie talks about it all the time. It’s your favorite show, isn’t it GD?”

“Their fans are called losers,” Georgie said, sounding delighted. “They’ve got it on the merch! And I have the t-shirt that says Team Sweaterboy.”

Richie pulled an exaggerated horrified face. “Hold up, you’ve got _Stan’s_ shirt?!” he cried. “King George. I cannot believe this. I cannot believe that after everything we’ve been through together, you’re a _sweaterboy_. Anyway, you have to be an absolute disaster. It’s obvious.”

“Why?”

“Well, you misplaced your whole arm, dumbo. That’s one-hundred-percent an absolute disaster move,” said Richie, and Mike watched as Bill’s face went white. 

There was a long, heavy pause, during which Stan brought his hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose. But then, into the silence, Georgie started laughing so hard he bent over, hand on his knees. Richie winked at Mike, and then reached out to give Georgie a gentle shove.

Bill blew out a long breath and Mike cleared his throat. “Anyway, uh, I came out because the summer school kids are going to be here soon,” he said, somewhat apologetically. “And if you guys are still here it’s gonna be a whole entire nightmare trying to get them to pay attention to anything other than Bill’s camera.”

Bev looked down at her watch and then shared a glance with Stan. “Okay,” she acquiesced. “Can we finish up quickly? It won’t be more than five minutes. Then we’ll get out of your hair. We should do some exploring, anyway.”

“Oh,” Mike said, surprised, “Are you going to the Neibolt house?”

Her eyes seemed to focus suddenly, looking at him. “Why? What’s the Neibolt house?”

“It’s haunted,” said Georgie wisely. “The most haunted place in Derry.”

Richie beamed, rubbing his hands together. “Well, are we not ghost hunters?” he asked rhetorically, spreading his arms out. “Maybe we’ll catch more than just your clown, Georgie-porgie. Maybe we’ll get a whole — a whole _cadre_ of ghouls. Oh! Oh, dude. What if we have our _first ghost orgy._”

“What’s an orgy?” asked Georgie, and Mike clapped his hands over his ears.

Richie made a face. “Whoops,” he said. “Well, I guess the ship has officially sailed on fingerbanging, anyway.” 

Bill dropped his face into his hands and then shot Mike an apologetic look. “We’ll wrap up,” he promised. “Maybe — Georgie could hang out with you? While we do? So that Richie doesn’t like, ruin his entire childhood?” 

Mike began to tug Georgie back up the steps toward the library, against his protests; he ushered him inside and then hesitated, one hand on the open door. Mike was a librarian. He’d grown up on a farm. He believed in science, and in the earth, and in what he could touch. 

But he also knew that the earth had memory. Dirt knew what it nourished last season, and when the harvest was bad, something of it sinks into the soil. Six years ago, he’d looked into a mirror and saw a face that wasn’t his. More years ago than that, he and Ben had gone into the Neibolt to get Eddie out and with every step he’d felt sharp something that wanted to draw him in and keep him, something with teeth. As Mike had picked up a bleeding Georgie Denbrough, Henry Bowers had blinked up at him from the water and said, _I’m floating, Mike Hanson. Down here we all float._

“You should be careful,” he heard himself say, against his better judgment. “I — look, I don’t ... necessarily believe in ghosts. But something in that house made Henry Bowers go crazy, and do terrible things, and — ” He shrugged. “The earth remembers what happens on it. That’s all.”

Bill and his friends all looked at him, and Mike pulled the door closed behind him.

-

“Well,” said Richie, “_that _was fucking spooky.”

Stan shot him a glare. “We’re in his hometown, poking around in what I’m sure is a tough patch of recent history,” he reminded him. “Maybe cool it on the, like, murder jokes.”

Bill was still looking at where the door had closed. It had been years since he’d seen Mike; in fact, he’d kind of forgotten about him, although now that he’d seen him again Bill remembered vividly: it was Mike that saved Georgie. Mike, and someone else, though he hadn’t quite recovered that part yet. It was weird, that he’d forgotten him. Bill hadn’t thought he’d ever forget any part of those months — Georgie in the hospital, the trial, Henry Bowers sitting across from him in the courtroom spouting nonsense.

When Bill turned back to the group, Richie was making a face and looping an arm around Stan’s neck. “Stan, you know that I joke as a stress coping mechanism,” he said. “It’s what makes me such a dynamic and interesting ghost hunter for television.”

“We’re not _on_ television,” Bev said. “Now get back in your places so we can wrap this up before Mike’s students come.”

Bill shook his head to clear it. It was this town, he decided. It had only bad memories.

_You’re a ghost hunter, aren’t you?_ Georgie had asked. But he wasn’t, really. Richie and Stan were ghost hunters, maybe; Bill was just the guy behind the camera who made sure everything ran smoothly. Bill wasn’t the hero, he was the guy who made sure the hero was well-lit. Mike had carried Georgie from the river; Bill just showed up later and sat by the bed, waiting, waiting, waiting.

He tucked his chin and peered through the camera’s viewfinder. The sun had started to sink, and the light made Stan and Richie look oddly poignant, shoving at one another. They weren’t going to find a ghost clown, because there wasn’t a ghost clown; but maybe Bill could find something else, for Georgie. Closure. Relief. Something.

“And so we begin our continuing investigation,” Richie picked up, grinning, “into the question: is today the day that I get to fingerbang a ghost?”

Stan looked dead into the camera and gave his head a firm shake.

-

After Mike texted him, Eddie went to wait outside of Richie Tozier’s room until he got back, arms folded across his chest and foot tapping furiously against the cement. First of all, how dare that tall, insouciant, floppy-haired douchebag waltz into Eddie’s hotel, insult it, and then sit on his counter with legs so long that Eddie could probably use them to measure cornstalks? 

And secondly: “Why the _fuck_ are you going to the Neibolt house?” he demanded when Richie and his crew pulled up. They had a fourth with him — Bill Denbrough, Eddie thought. Mike had texted him earlier to say that he was back in town. Eddie supposed it made sense, given that he had an executive producer credit on the show, which Eddie had definitely not spent the entire night binge watching.

It was funny. Whatever.

Richie blinked at him. “Uh, because it’s haunted?” he said, looking back at his friends as if for help. “And our job is to go to haunted places and seduce the ghosts there?”

“Absolutely no one is asking you to seduce the ghosts,” the guy who checked them in — Stan, if Eddie remembered correctly, which he did, because they were the only guests at the hotel, currently. “I’ve actually asked you many times not to.”

“You’re not my boss, Stanley,” Richie dismissed. 

“Who _is_ our boss?” asked the woman. Bev, Eddie surmised. _Get In, Loser_’s director. “Do we have a boss?”

“It’s called horizontal leadership,” Bill told her, and then gave Eddie a tired smile. “Richie is kind of right, though. We’re going to try to prove or disprove that the house is haunted.” 

“Don’t,” Eddie said. His stomach felt tight and his foot tapped faster. It was starting to ache at the joint. “Just — look, bad shit happens in the Neibolt, okay? Bad shit only. Exclusively. Always.” 

When Eddie was a kid, he’d fled Bowers and his gang and hid out in the Neibolt. He didn’t like to think about ... he’d never been able to say, concretely whether what he’d seen had been real, or shadows, or his imagination. He’d gone in so high strung already. His mother always told him that he was prone to hallucinations, and even though Eddie was old enough now to know that a lot of the things his mother told him about his medical history was probably bullshit, she’d been right that he’d had an active fantasy life, as a kid. He was small, his only friends were Mike and Ben, and the only girl who ever talked to him was Greta Bowie, and that was just to give him his placebos and tell him that he was a loser.

But — he _had_ seen something. It had looked like ... Eddie didn’t know. A crawling thing with a human face. He’d sworn he’d heard it say his name.

“Are you worried about me, Lobby Man?” Richie asked, looking pleased.

“I literally do not know you,” Eddie returned. “I’m just a concerned citizen, okay. I’m a humanitarian.”

“Yeah,” said Richie, snorting. “You seem deeply invested in the wellbeing of your fellow man.”

Eddie flicked him off. “Okay, fuck you, bro. I’m trying to help you.”

“What do you mean ‘bad shit’?” Bev interrupted. She had hoisted the camera up onto her shoulder and was filming, Eddie realized. He had a flash of shyness, and then Richie said, “It’s where he used to go to jerk off, I’ll bet,” and he forgot to be shy, because he was too irritated to be shy.

“You’re gonna love jerking off when you figure out how, asshole,” he snapped back. It felt kind of ... weirdly — good? To be able to snap at someone. Mike was too thoughtful to ever say anything irritating, and Ben irritated Eddie all the fucking time but he was such a soft, good boy that Eddie always pulled his punches. He’d been so little and sickly growing up, everyone had always treated him with kid gloves; but Eddie hadn’t needed kid gloves. He’s been spoiling for a fight his whole life.

But this morning Richie Tozier had waltzed into his lobby like a real asshole and something in Eddie had just known that this was the person he’d been waiting for. Someone who wouldn’t treat Eddie like he needed to be _handled_. 

Richie had the face of a man who liked getting punched, and Eddie had hands that had never been allowed.

“You’re gonna love your asshole when you figure out how to use it while you’re jerking off,” Richie returned.

“We _cannot_ keep that in the final cut,” said Stan.

“Don’t be a homophobe,” said Bev.

“Yeah, Stan,” Richie agreed, still matching Eddie’s glare, “don’t be a homophobe.”

There was a pause. “Oh,” Bill startled, visibly coming to a realization. “Is this flirting? Is that what’s happening right now? You guys are flirting?”

Eddie yanked his gaze away from Richie to look at Stan. “No,” he insisted. “Absolutely not.”

“Definitely yes,” Richie corrected. “Sorry, what? Yes. We are flirting. One thousand percent we are flirting. This is called foreplay, Eddie. I know you’ve never had sex before, but — ”

“Fuck you, I’ve had sex before!” yelled Eddie. “I’m great at sex, actually, you spindly, consumptive fucking — waifboy.”

“_Waifboy_?! Bev, draw up the merch _right_ now, I want a WAIFBOY t-shirt.” Richie cried, a smile stretched so wide across his mouth that Eddie could have fit a whole pear in it. His heart did a little flip. 

Shit. They _were_ flirting.

“Look,” he said, trying to get the ship back on course, “I’m serious. The Neibolt is — it’s a bad place, okay? It’s bad. A few years ago, there were ...” He glanced at Bill, who waved him on tiredly. “There was a series of murders. The guy who did it, he’d been living there, and it — it fucked him up, somehow. It made him nuts. I don’t know if it’s fucking ghosts but it’s _something_, all right?”

Bev shifted the camera, tilting her head to look at him, gaze oddly penetrating. “You’ve been inside,” she surmised. “What did you see?”

All three heads swiveled from looking at Bev to looking at Eddie, and he shifted uncomfortably, looking away. “No,” he lied. “Nothing. No.” 

Richie narrowed his eyes, getting close enough that he could put a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie let him. “You _did_,” Richie said. “You definitely did, and it scared you.”

“I’m not talking about this with you,” Eddie told him flatly, shaking off his hand and turning away from the camera. “Whatever. If you guys want to go get yourselves killed, that’s on you. I did my best, it’s on the record, I am free from responsibility, fuck off.”

As he shifted back toward the door to the lobby, Richie’s hand came back to his arm. “Hey,” he murmured, voice low. Eddie paused. “We can put the camera away. It can be just us. Will you tell me?”

His tone had lost the joyful combativeness of before; when Eddie met his gaze, Richie looked serious and interested, something soft and clever whirring in his brain.

_Oh no,_ Eddie thought.

Behind Richie, Eddie watched Bev lower the camera. 

He sighed. “Fine,” he muttered. “But I’m not talking about this without getting drunk first.” 

“I love getting drunk!” cried Richie cheerfully, hopping back onto the blithe horse he’d road in on, metaphorically speaking. “Let’s raid the minibar. Our pal Eddie can write it off as a work expense.”

“I’m not your pal,” Eddie grumped. “I don’t even know you.”

Richie slung one arm around Eddie’s neck and one around Bev’s, dragging them forward with him to their hotel room and then waiting regally until, rolling her eyes, Bev dug the key out of her pocket and let them in. Behind them, Stan and Bill were following slowly, talking in low voices. Richie emptied out the fridge and also pulled a bottle of something out of his suitcase, pouring a shot for each of them.

(Eddie was definitely going to charge them for whatever they took out of the minibar.)

He and Bev hooked arms, grinning at each other, and threw back whatever they were drinking. Bill was filming again, having taken the camera from Bev, and Eddie — he knew he shouldn’t, probably. He shouldn’t drink on the job and definitely not on camera, but.

Richie was looking at him like a challenge, looking at him like he knew Eddie wouldn’t say no, so he reached directly for the bottle and swallowed a gulp of it down. Bev and Richie cheered, and then Bev handed Stan a shot glass and carefully tipped another into Bill’s mouth, dictating her actions for the camera as she did.

“It’s rare we get Big Bill to misbehave,” she joked, and bopped onscreen to stick her tongue out and form rock-out hands in a pose. “But today is a special day! We made a new friend. Bill, get him on camera, he’s so cute.”

“I’m not cute,” Eddie protested. “Fuck you guys.”

“You _are_,” said Richie. “Cute, cute, cute. In fact, you’re definitely not allowed to come on any of our ghost hunts because then the ghosts might get distracted from me by your adorable little face, and if we find a ghost but it decides to get freaky with someone who’s _not even on the crew_, I will lose my shit, and you can quote me on that.”

Eddie blinked at him. “Do you, actually, sincerely, want to fuck a ghost?” he asks. It had definitely been tequila, what he drank. His throat was still warm.

Richie knelt down in front of where Eddie was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Do I not seem like the type of person who would want to fuck a ghost?” he asked.

“You seem like the type of person who wants people to think he’s the type of person who would want to fuck a ghost,” Eddie told him honestly, and Bev let out a long laugh.

“Oh, Richie, babe, that’s your whole life on display,” she said. 

“Are we still filming?” Stan asked. “Because I want to replay forever the look on Richie’s face.”

Richie went blank for a second, then rearranged his expression into something cheerful and grinning. But Eddie’s stomach lit up: maybe the booze, maybe desire. He wanted to poke at Richie again, again and again, until all that bluster dissolved. Eddie wanted to needle him until he bled, and then he — he wanted — 

“I saw something in the Neibolt house,” he blurted. Stan came and quietly sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders brushed. Eddie was sure it was just to keep them both in the camera frame, but it was comforting anyway. 

Who _were_ these people?

Richie stayed squatting in front of Eddie, but now he flashed a grin. “What did you see?” he asked. “Was it a clown, because we’re hunting a clown.”

Eddie shook his head. “It was — hard to explain. Maybe a man. It was ... it had ... it looked like it had sores and scabs and — and it couldn’t walk, its hands and feet were deformed. I never told anybody, because it was late, and dark, and I thought — no one would believe me. But I know something was there. It said my name.”

Stan and Richie exchanged a look. 

“It said your name?” Stan repeated. “Like, it called for you?”

Eddie nodded, swallowing thickly. “It said — God, you know what’s weird is I pass by that house all the time and I never _think_ about it. But it said ...” 

He shuddered. Suddenly he didn’t want to say it. He didn’t want it to exist out in the world, on camera, like if he said it then it would call to whatever thing Eddie had seen. And he _had_ seen it. He knew he had. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Richie said.

Stan nodded warmly beside him, gently knocking their shoulders together. “You saw something and it spoke to you, okay. That’s enough.”

_I’ll blow you for a nickel, Eddie. For a dime. For free._

“It wanted to blow me,” Eddie heard himself confess.

The room went quiet. Eddie held his breath and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look at anyone or be looked at by them. Fuck. That was on _camera_. Maybe they would cut it out? Maybe they would — 

“Well, that settles it,” Richie said, and Eddie felt him move away back toward the desk. When he opened his eyes, Richie was pouring two more shots. “Eddie’s not coming on any of the hunts. This fucker spends five seconds with a ghost and he’s getting offered BJs — I make a career out of trying to get nasty with literally _one_ Victorian in an oversized bustle and I get nothing. It’s bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.” 

“Damn, I guess Stan’s mom was right about you,” Bev said, taking one of the shots from him and then pouring another, for Stan. “You _are_ a schmuck.” 

Behind the camera, Bill laughed, and Richie made an outraged face. “Stan, tell Bev you were kidding,” he demanded, handing the shot glass to Eddie. “Don’t let her say these things on camera. Don’t let this smear campaign against the love your mother and I have for one another go on.”

“_Chas v’shalom_,” Stan said dryly. 

“Are all of your shoots like this?” Eddie asked. “Because you can’t tell in the episodes. Whoever does your editing is really good.”

Stan puffed up a little, but the look Richie gave him made Eddie want to shove him in a locker. “You watch the show?”

“I did research after you swanned into my lobby saying insane things,” Eddie insisted, sticking out his chin. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t a bunch of lunatics.”

“Oh, we’re definitely a bunch of lunatics,” Bev reported sadly. She had a slight wobble to her. Eddie thought maybe he wasn’t the only one feeling the alcohol. Behind her, Bill put down the camera and went to the table, drinking straight out of the bottle, like Richie had. 

“_They’re_ lunatics, _I’m_ normal,” Bill insisted, and then after a pause added, “and Stan. Stan’s good, too.”

Stan beamed. “Thank you, Bill,” he said, cheeks a little pink. “That means a lot, coming from you.”

Bev made a long fart sound, and Richie harmonized it. 

“I like you,” Eddie announced to the room. “Don’t go to the Neibolt.”

He lay back on the bed so that he wouldn’t have to look at any of them. From somewhere near his feet, Richie said, “We have to go, Eds. It’s our job.”

Eddie frowned. “Don’t call me Eds,” he told the ceiling, and then closed his eyes, and slept.

-

Ben hadn’t been home two hours when they called his mom’s house asking him to join on a volunteer call because they were short a couple of guys on holiday. She’d rolled her eyes at him, but he went anyway, because saying no felt rude. 

He was glad he had when the address came through.

_eddie u ok?_ he texted at the first red light, and when he got no response, _eddie answer me._

He met the truck a few blocks from the hotel, and slipped into one of the spare suits as they drove on — the smoke wasn’t too bad on arrival, and there were only two cars in the lot, which meant that probably there weren’t many guests. 

Sitting on the edge of the ambulance was Eddie, a guy Ben didn’t know, and — 

“Embers?” he blurted, frowning. 

The woman looked up, and her jaw dropped. Beside her, the two men she lived with took Ben in with saucer-eyes. 

Eddie stood and flung himself in Ben’s direction, giving him a tight hug and then promptly punching him hard enough on the arm to actually really hurt. “Okay, first of all, fucker, why didn’t I know you were coming into town? And second of all it took eight _hundred years_ for the shit-ass fire department to get here, what the fuck!” 

Ben couldn’t resist reaching out to tousle Eddie’s hair. “I _just_ got here,” he said. “How — how do you guys know each other?”

Eddie blinked. “How does who know each other?” he asked.

“You guys,” said Ben, and gestured.

“Me and these guys?” Eddie repeated. “What do you mean, me and these guys?”

“I mean — ”

“The hot fireman is from _Derry_?” the tall, skinny one interrupted. “Hot fireman, you’re from Derry? Here? In Maine?”

Ben and Eddie both swivelled to look at him. Ben felt his cheeks flushing. He didn’t know how to respond. If he responded it would seem like he also thought he was a hot fireman, and Ben mostly just thought of himself as ... well, a fireman.

Embers was still staring at him. She hadn’t said anything. Ben should probably learn her real name.

“What do you mean _the hot fireman_?” Eddie squeaked. “Ben, are you the hot fireman?”

“Um,” mumbled Ben, ears going hot.

“Holy shit, who’d have thought. The hot fireman followed us all the way to Maine, and his name is Ben. Bev, say hi to Ben.”

Bev! Her name was Bev.

“We almost burned our apartment down a bunch of times, and your man Ben here always came to our rescue,” the tall guy was explaining cheerfully. “Bill! Open your eyes, the hot fireman is here.”

Without opening his eyes, the man called Bill waved.

“So arson is, like, a thing with you,” Eddie said. “That’s why you came here. To burn down my hotel.”

“We didn’t _burn down your hotel_, you drama queen. The fire was like, _so _small. We burned down a very small portion of your hotel, and actually, you had a direct hand in that because you woke up from your little catnap and scared the bejeezus out of me which is why I hit the wrong button on the — ”

“THERE ARE FIRE TRUCKS IN MY PARKING LOT, RICHIE, THE FIRE WAS BIG E-FUCKING-NOUGH.”

“OKAY LOOK, YOU TINY LITTLE GOBLIN MAN — ”

Eddie was right at least that he was going to have to close down for a few days, but Ben didn’t think now was the time to voice that particular opinion. He felt like maybe it could wait until tempers had cooled slightly.

“Waifboy and Goblin Man,” said Bill. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. Richie and Eddie ignored him, continuing to shout at each other. Ben, having decided that Eddie was okay, turned his attention to the remaining three, focusing mostly on Bill because if he looked at Bev for too long he was going to start blushing. “If ghost hunting doesn’t work out we can start an animated series.”

_fire @ the hotel, eddie ok_, he texted Mike. _also i’m back in town for a while._

“Ohh, there you go, Stan,” Bev said. “That would really take your editing abilities to the next level.”

“ — NAP? IS IT A CRIME IN MY _OWN HOTEL_ TO GET AN _OUNCE_ OF FUCKING SHUT EYE — ”

“We can’t let Richie be a voice actor, it would go to his head immediately,” the one Stan informed them calmly. He was watching Richie and Eddie yell at each other like it was a tennis match. In his hands was a still-smoking bag of popcorn, which he held out to Bev, who took a charred handful and popped it into her mouth. 

She grinned at him. Her teeth had black all over them. Ben thought that probably she was the most beautiful woman in the world. “I thought the charred bits gave you cancer,” Bev joked.

“ — _MY FAULT_? YOU LYING THERE IN YOUR LITTLE UNIFORM LIKE SOME TERRIBLE SEVENTIES PORNO, WHO DESIGNED THOSE SHIRTS, WHO — ”

“Honestly, at this point, we’d all be lucky to die of cancer,” Stan said.

Bill finally cracked an eye. “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I want to go out with a bang. I want to go out in like, a hand gliding accident.”

“ — HEARD OF SMOKE INHALATION? YOU CAN — ”

“ — SEEN _THIS IS US_, ASSHOLE — ”

_What? _Mike texted him. _Oh my God. I’m on my way. Does Eddie need a place to stay? Welcome back btw_. 

“Hey,” Stan said suddenly, “where are we going to sleep?”

Eddie and Richie stopped yelling at each other, both turning to look at Stan.

“Mike is on his way,” Ben told Eddie.

“Mike’s house is big,” Eddie said. He cut a glance to Richie and then away.

Ben held up his hands in a gesture meant to indicate that he wasn’t taking responsibility for anything. Eddie was breathing hard, probably from the yelling, but he hadn’t reached for his inhaler. His hand was laying at his side, knuckles brushing Richie. He was flushed.

He looked — Ben had never seen him look like that. Like he was the happiest angry person in the world.

Ben had come home because his mother had called him, and asked him to come. He had come home because he had started getting that feeling, that frightening hazy feeling when he thought about Derry. It always happened when he stayed away too long, and he hated it.

Not because he liked Derry, particularly — it was a small town full of small memories, but Ben had friends who loved him, here, loved him better than anyone anywhere else in the world. And if he forgot them, who would take care of them? He and Mike had grown up chasing Eddie into scraps and carrying him out of them. He and Eddie had grown up listening to Mike read them stories until they fell asleep. He had grown up watching both of them, thinking, _there aren’t better people anywhere on earth._

“Party at Mike’s house!” cried Richie. “I can bunk with Eddie.”

“No you can’t,” Eddie snapped, but his ears were red.

Bev leaned in. She smelled like smoke and like popcorn. Ben felt a little helpless, looking at her. “I don’t know who you people are,” she said, like _Ben_ was the weird one, like it was _Ben_ who had set an apartment on fire six times and then followed her to her hometown and done it again, “but I’ve honestly never seen two people fall in love this fast.”

“I do not know this man! We are not in love!” Eddie yelled, throwing his hands in the air.

“We’re gonna be,” Richie announced, and winced when Eddie hit him. “_Ow!_ Damn, you’re strong for a smurf, what the fuck, I’m _kidding._” Eddie hit him again. “What! I’m ... _not_ kidding?” One more time. “Well, what do you want me to say!” 

“Nothing! Stop talking!” 

Richie mimed zipping his lips, and Eddie turned away from him in a huff. Behind his back, Richie flashed Ben two big thumbs up. 

Ben smiled down at Bev, who was looking up at him, hair glinting in the light from the firetruck. Bill Denbrough was watching them, and Stan was watching him. Distantly, Ben heard the unmistakable sound of Mike’s terrible truck. 

Stan said, “This is going to be the weirdest episode we’ve ever done.”


	2. are you there, demons?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Aaaaand there’s the conspiracy theory,” Eddie interrupted. “Right on time. The evil overlords of water pollution that famously makes Mainers do murder.”
> 
> “Okay, fine, it’s a magical evil cosmic force that awakens in Derry every generation and eats its populace,” Ben returned sarcastically. “That makes much more sense.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me @ me: maybe if you didn't keep writing half a page of dumb bullshit like "the losers argue about the literary merits of donna tartt's _the goldfinch_" this story wouldn't need an additional chapter
> 
> me back @ me: if i can't force richard tozier to say the words "theo decker sucks" then why am i even alive??? 
> 
> anyway visit me on tumblr at itsvarnes, because it's varnes.

Mike wasn’t sure how he got roped into a house full of Eddie and strangers, but almost without any input from him they — and all their camera equipment — piled into his truck. Ben followed behind in his mother’s Mazda, and there would have been a lot more _room_ if they’d split between the cars, but apparently the _Get In_ crew did not believe in personal space because it hadn’t even been a question that Bev would sit on Richie’s lap, that Bill shove all eight miles of his legs into the minimal space between the back seat and Eddie’s seat, which he scooted almost all the way, to brutal mocking. 

“Fuck all of you, fuck _all_ of you, okay, I’m doing a nice _fucking_ thing for your friend Bill and you’re coming at me with _jokes_ — ”

“Eddie,” Bev said calmly, “they’re not jokes. You’re a small man. Itty bitty. Pocket-sized.”

“I’m five-fucking-nine, okay, which is statistically fucking _average_,” Eddie snapped back. “It’s not _my_ fault that Americans have gotten statistically shorter since the nineteen-eighties! It was Reagan-fucking-nomics.”

Stan blinked a few times. “... Ronald Reagan made Americans shorter?” he asked.

“I don’t think anyone can prove it was a causal relationship,” Mike interjected before Eddie could say anything else. “But yes, the timeline matches up. Technically.”

“Ha!” cried Eddie, triumphantly. “See? I told you.”

“Well, clearly Big Bill over there didn’t get the memo,” Richie joked. “Oh, hey, Mike, turn it up, I love this song.”

Mike frowned. “Then The Morning Comes? By Smash Mouth?” he clarified. “You love ... _this_ song?”

Stan shot him a grin in the rearview mirror. “Richie is a big Smash Mouth fan,” he said. “He’s got a cover band.”

“We’re good,” Richie insisted. “You can barely tell the difference between us and the original.”

“That is emphatically not true,” said Bill. “You are much, _much_ worse.”

Eddie twisted around to give Richie the most horrified expression Mike had ever seen him make, and Mike had once half-carried his near-unconscious body from the Neibolt. “You have a _Smash Mouth cover band_?” he repeated. “Oh my God. I hate you. I think I hate you. I think I hate everything about you.” 

“There can’t be a high demand for a Smash Mouth cover band,” Mike mused, frowning. “How do you get gigs?”

“It’s the basic principle of supply and demand, Mikey,” Richie told him imperiously, waving a hand. “If you supply it, they will demand it.”

“I don’t think that’s right,” Bev said. “But I don’t know enough about microeconomics to dispute it.”

Richie shout-sang along with the radio: “Then some were spellbound some were hell-bound! Some they fell down and some got back up and fought back against the melt down!” 

He had an okay voice, actually, although Mike wasn’t sure it was possible to sound _good_ singing Smash Mouth as an act of aggression. 

At the chorus, taking all of them by surprise, Bill bellowed out: “So don’t delay, act now! Supplies are running out!”

The back seat erupted in cheers, and Richie yelling out with unbridled delight, “BIG BIIIIIIILL!” before all four of them finished: “And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow, but if the offer’s shunned — ”

Eddie was looking at Mike. Mike raised an eyebrow back, and saw the way Eddie’s lips was twitching, saw the way his face was lighting up, saw him looking like the Eddie he’d so rarely been allowed to be because of all his illnesses: bright and burning as hot as any fire Ben had ever been called to put out.

Something was happening, Mike thought. Something he couldn’t explain. Something he didn’t even know how to begin to think about: that four people could simply show up and shift the world onto or off of its axis seemed crazy, seemed absolutely insane, and yet here they were, in Mike’s car, as if — as if that’s where they were meant to be, all six of them. Missing only the man in the Mazda behind them, flashing his flights because Mike was speeding. 

Maybe good things just happened sometimes, Mike supposed. Even in Derry.

He winked at Eddie and together they joined the chorus, shouting it into the night, shouting down whatever it was that had brought them all here. Mike had spent his life chasing peace and quiet, but

you could be loud, he thought, when there were enough of you. You could be as loud as you wanted and take up the space you thought was yours. 

What would he sound like, if he wasn’t whispering?

He had put himself in the library because it was safe and it contained him, but in his truck full of Eddie and near-strangers, Mike thought: _oh. _He thought: _oh—but what if I let myself out?_

-

Eddie had been right: Mike’s house was huge. It was an old farmhouse, clearly meant to house several generations of a family, and only Mike to live in it. There was something sad about that, Stan thought, but he didn’t know Mike well enough to ask, and he didn’t want to bring the vibe down. So instead he let Richie scope them out a room, only to find that Richie had scoped out the room that Eddie always slept in, and Eddie wasn’t giving it up.

“But I called dibs,” complained Richie.

“Tough shit,” Eddie replied.

“There are two beds,” Mike reminded them, soothingly. “Either rock-paper-scissors for it like civilized adults or share.”

Richie and Eddie blinked at each other. Stan hid a smile by coughing into his arm. Richie had always talked a big game, but at the end of the day, Stan knew something that almost no one else did: Richie was a romantic. He’d tried having one-night stands in college and always ended up in love with them by morning, which meant that as a general rule he liked to push and prod and joke and then, at the end of the night, panic and Irish goodbye before anyone could invite him home. 

He liked to be shocking, but he was too fucking soft to live up to his own hype. 

But Richie _liked_ Eddie, Stan thought; liked him in a way that Richie didn’t often like people, because Richie had Stan. Stan was always worried that people wouldn’t like him, that he’d be the odd man out, but Richie didn’t give a shit because _Stan_ loved him, and Stan was Richie’s favorite person in the world.

“Great,” Stan said, before Richie could talk his way out of it. “Big Bill and I will take the room on the third floor. Bev, because you’re a delicate lady, you can have that attic room all to yourself.”

“Delicate your Aunt fucking Fanny,” Bev told him, “but that being said, yes, I’ll take the attic room to myself.”

“And Ben can crash in the portrait room,” Mike decided. “Great. It’s all settled. _Don’t_ look at me like that, Ben, the portrait room is _fine._”

Ben, the Hot Fireman who had somehow, despite all odds and reason, shown up in Derry, Maine to rescue them from yet another burning building, scratched at the back of his neck, looking sheepish. “It’s your Aunt Miriam,” he muttered. “She _watches_ me.”

“She’s a painting,” Mike reminded him gently. “She doesn’t have animus, Benjamin.”

“That’s what you fucking say,” Eddie grumbled. “I’m on Ben’s side on this. Aunt Miriam is a pervert. When I slept in there last time I swear to God I saw her eyebrows rise when I changed into my pajamas.”

Mike pinched the bridge of his nose, the gesture of a man who has had this argument many times before and understood that he would have it many times again. “I am _begging_ you guys to stop being weird about my Aunt Miriam,” he said. “Look, even if you’re right, you’ve been afraid of her for like, two decades, and so far she hasn’t done anything but raise her eyebrows at Eddie’s dick one time. So let the old lady have her fun.”

“_You_ sleep with her, if you’re so casual about it,” Ben said. His gaze darted to Bev and away, clearly embarrassed to be showing weakness but too unnerved to hide it. 

They loved each other, Stan realized — all three of them, they loved each other the way that Stan, Bill, Bev and Richie loved each other: there was layers of it, woven in with everything else that comes with time. Annoyance, resignation, amusement; all of that was woven into the way that Mike said, “_Benjamin_,” as if that word meant a thousand things.

It felt good to see them love each other, to be pulled into the orbit of that love. It felt good to be there, all seven of them together, as if they hadn’t known it but they’d been looking for each other all this long time.

“I could take the portrait room,” Bev volunteered, cheeks a little pink.

Stan glanced at Bill, who was studiously looking at his shoes. Ben was ... probably more handsome than Bill, in an objective sense, but Bill was — well, he was _Bill._ Stan didn’t understand how anyone could love anybody else when they had ... the option. Of Bill. Who was kind and good and also, fucking unbearable, and wanted to be treated as such. Bev’s problem was that she fell for it, Stan thought; she took his kindness and his goodness and she thought that made him, like, fully-formed, when in fact Stan knew that Bill was always constantly living by the seat of his pants, trusting his gut and hoping for the best. Poor Bill, so tired all the time beneath the weight of being admired.

Not that Stan — 

Not that he’d ever, like — 

That would be insane. Richie would never stand for it, for one thing. And for another, Bill was the poster boy for being just a dumb fucking heterosexual. Stan knew, objectively, that he understood that Richie was bi, that Stan himself had occasionally dabbled, that one time in college during one of their off periods Bev had gotten very serious about a girl named Laura who’d had a nose ring. But he didn’t think Bill, like. _Got it._ He tried so hard, but at the end of the day Stan didn’t think he’d ever actually had to one time think about who he loved and why.

“No,” Ben was saying, blushing furiously. “Uh. That’s really nice, thanks, Emb.....everly. But I wouldn’t want Aunt Miriam to get her claws on you, too.”

Bev raised her eyebrows. “What was it you called me?” she asked. “At the hotel?”

Stan hadn’t thought it would be possible for Ben to look more embarrassed, but he did. He said: “Oh. Uh. It’s because ... you set your house on fire so many times? And you have red hair? So I. I didn’t know your name, I just thought of you as ... uh. Embers.”

Richie gave an exaggerated sniff and wiped his eyes. “That’s fucking adorable,” he announced. “Gross. Get out of here. Go sleep with sexy, dead Aunt Miriam.”

“If you wanna fuck a ghost so bad, maybe _you_ should sleep in the portrait room,” Eddie suggested meanly. “Ben can room with me.”

“I’m sure me and Ben could share the portrait room,” teased Richie, and Eddie drew his shoulders back like he was getting ready for a physical altercation.

He pointed a stern finger at Richie. “Leave Ben alone,” he demanded. “He’s too gentle for you. You’ll break him.”

“Eddie, I’m like, twice your height,” Ben pointed out, voice helpless with affection. “I could deadlift two of you.”

“Okay, show off,” Eddie said. “We get it, you’re hot.”

“That’s not what I — ”

“No,” said Richie, “he’s right. You’re very hot, Ben. You should be proud of that. Bev, isn’t he very hot?”

“_Richie_,” Stan hissed, catching Richie’s eyes and cutting his look to Bill in an attempt to indicate _shut the fuck up you’re hurting Bill’s feelings._ Richie rolled his eyes. He made a face that clearly meant _he’s a grown up, Stanley._

Bill leaned in to Stan’s shoulder, flashing him a grateful smile as Bev said dryly, “Yes, Richie, he’s very hot.” 

“That’s why we call you The Hot Fireman,” Richie explained. “We set our apartment on fire twice just so you’d come rescue us.”

Ben frowned. “Okay, that’s — _so_ unsafe,” he said fretfully. “You could have just called.”

Richie mines picking up a phone. “Uh, yes, hello?” he said into his hand, doing his best goblin voice. “Is this the fire department? Could you send us please your hottest fireman? Oh no, no emergency, just trying to suck some —”

“_Anyway_,” interrupted Eddie, “I’m going to go change into pajamas and then I’m going to raid Mike’s wine cellar and we’re all going to get super drunk so that you’re all too hungover to go to the Neibolt tomorrow. Who’s sleeping with me?”

Stan said: “Richie is,” because, left to his own devices, Richie would make a joke and end up in the portrait room.

Richie glared at him, but Eddie flashed a smile before picking up Richie’s bag. “Great,” he said with an air of careful ease. “Let’s go, Tozier. I’m taking the bed by the window, do _not_ argue with me, I _will_ fight you over it and I swear to _God_ if you make a short joke — ”

He was still yammering as he left the room, Richie trailing helplessly behind him. 

Bev hooked her bag over her shoulder. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll go get settled in the attic since Ben is taking one for the team and braving Aunt Miriam,” she said jovially. “See you guys in a few.”

Stan followed Bill up the steps to the third floor, neither of them saying anything. Stan dropped his bag by the door and flung himself onto the bed nearest to the bathroom and Bill dumped his onto the foot of the other bed, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

“I f-f-fucking hate this place,” he muttered. “Not Mike’s specifically. Just. The whole fucking t-town.”

Stan blinked at him, not sure if he was supposed to sound surprised or not. Eventually he said, “I know you do.”

“It’s everything. It’s my p-p-parents, it’s Gee, it’s ... everything here just feels so fucking — ”

“Haunted?” Stan supplied dryly. “Yeah.” 

Bill laughed. “We weren’t always like this,” he said. “Before ... when I was a kid, and before Gee’s ... before he lost his arm. My parents were like, totally different people. We were happy. I don’t know.”

Stan’s family had always been happy, in their very specific way. His parents loved him. They wanted him to succeed. They didn’t agree with his choices, but he wasn’t uninvited to Hannukuh, you know? When he went home they fussed over him and told him that Richie was a nightmare but they still gave Richie birthday presents. They still understood that Richie was Stan’s ... well, that Richie was Stan’s, and they loved Stan, so they loved Richie too, even though he was explicitly uninvited from any events at which he might reasonably be expected to make any kind of speech. 

They drove him insane but he loved them and he knew they loved him, and that was family, to Stan. That’s what family _meant_.

That wasn’t Bill’s family. There was Georgie, and then there was everyone else that Bill put up with because he wanted his brother to know that he was beloved.

“It was a big deal,” Stan reminded him gently. “Georgie almost died. In the most horrible way a little boy can die. It changes people.”

“It didn’t change Georgie.”

Stan gave him a look. “William. Please. Yes it did.”

Bill flopped back to his bed, then reconsidered and moved over to Stan’s, laying down next to him. Their arms brushed from their shoulders down to their knuckles, but Bill didn’t seem to notice, because he was Bill, and he was stupid. So smart and thoughtful and good but dumb as a box of fucking rocks, in Stan’s opinion. 

“Yes it did,” he agreed on a sigh. “But Stan. The clown isn’t real.”

Stan thought about everything Eddie had said, and Mike. He thought about the way Georgie looked when he talked about the clown. He thought about the way he’d felt driving past the _DERRY WELCOMES YOU_ sign.

“It’s real to Georgie,” he decided eventually. “Whether or not we find anything, it matters to him that you came. That you’re going to try.”

Bill turned his head so that he was looking at Stan. Their noses were very close.

“If I’d been here,” Bill muttered. “I thought about — my parents wanted me to take a year. When they moved. Help everyone settle in. Gee was so — but I didn’t want to leave. I was having fun at school.”

“Bill,” said Stan, “you’re not Georgie’s dad.”

“Yeah but — ”

“Even if you’d been here. What would you have done? What would you have done, other than maybe get murdered before Georgie did?”

Bill was quiet. He met Stan’s gaze and they just looked at each other, for a while. Stan thought: _you don’t know how good you are_. He thought: _Bill. Bill. You fucking idiot. You absolute fucking moron. You have no idea_.

Bill said, “The thing with Bev.”

Stan sighed, and turned away. The thing with Bev. “Yeah,” he agreed. “How are you doing?”

“I love Bev,” Bill told him, also turning away to look up at the ceiling. “It’s just. I love the Bev that she is when she’s not trying to be whoever the fuck she thinks it is that I want.”

“Bill,” Stan pointed out, “you _treat her_ like the person she thinks you want.”

“What?”

Stan scrubbed at his forehead. How was it possible that he, Stanley Uris, was the most emotionally intelligent of his friends? He hadn’t had a serious relationship since he was nineteen. If he thought about it, which he really tried not to, Richie was probably the most significant relationship of his life, which was ... so pathetic. “Bev is — she’s like Richie,” Stan explained. “She’s smart and she’s good and she’s got depth to her, but on the surface, what she _wants to be_ is garbage. I treat Richie like I believe that he’s garbage because that’s what he wants. It makes him happy. He knows that I know but we both let him pretend until he needs me to remind him that he’s more than that. And Bev ... Bev wants to make you happy. You treat her like you see her, which is as someone who’s beautiful and put-together and good.”

“But she _is _beautiful and put-together and good.”

“Not in her _heart_,” Stan said. “In her heart she’s ... ” 

He thought about it. In her heart, he thought Bev was bold and unapologetic and gross and stupid and clever and full of life. In her heart, Bev was all the things she thought Bill was afraid of, turned up to eleven. He settled on: “Dumb as fuck, and brave.” 

“I know Bev is brave.”

“You know Bev is reckless. That’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

Stan turned his head again, reaching out to place his hand on Bill’s cheek, turning his face back to look at him. Stan was not reckless, he thought. He wasn’t particularly brave either. But he knew when he was right. “Bill,” he said. “At some point you’re going to have to recognize that all your friends are a mess.”

Bill blinked. “You’re not,” he said.

Stan looked at where his hand was on Bill’s cheek. He thought about doing the show for all these years despite how anxious it made him. He thought about what it meant, to say _this is a thing I want_ instead of just accepting what the world gave him.

He laughed. 

“Well,” Stan said, letting Bill go: “I guess that you thinking that is the whole point, isn’t it?”

-

Eddie walked swiftly and with determination to the guest room, Richie following behind him. He didn’t panic, because he was an adult, and a hotel manager besides. He’d had lots of weird unruly guests in his hotel before, and this was just like that. Sort of. It was kind of like that, insofar as Richie and his friends were weird and unruly. It was unlike that in ... other ways.

When they got to the room, Richie dumped his bag on the bed nearest the door and held his phone up, filming. “Stan’s gotten really into using mixed cameras, getting a kind of ‘found footage’ vibe going while on location,” he explained, scanning the room. “Anyway Losers, welcome to Haunted Farmhouse 101. Here we have the terrible curtains, requisite in these kinds of places _ob_viously, pictures of dead relatives — of which I am told there is a whole _room,_ so, jazzed about that, and of course, this is Eddie, the cutest boy in the world, whose hotel we were staying at until there was a fire.”

“There ‘was a fire,’” Eddie repeated, putting his hands on his hips. “You _set_ my hotel on fire.”

“A fire began at your hotel, where I also was,” Richie offered, like this was a negotiation. It was not a negotiation! Eddie was there! He knew the facts! “It’s impossible to say who was really at fault.”

Eddie opened the drawer in the dresser that he kept some spare clothes in, and made sure to turn back around before he rolled his eyes. “You were! You were at fault.”

“Well, we can agree to disagree.”

“I will be sure to put that on the insurance claim, dickbag.”

“Okay, I don’t think we need to get _insurance companies_ involved — ”

Eddie pointed a stern finger at him. “No? Are you going to pay for the damages? Out of your earnings from your medium-popular _web television ghost hunting show_?”

“Wow!” Richie cried, still only looking at him from the other side of his iPhone. “Wow, did you hear that, Losers? He called us _medium-popular._ Bitch, we made YouTube rewind last year. We did an interview with Digital Spy and they called us, _and I quote_, ‘the best ghost hunting show on the web,’ so Buzzfeed Unsolved can suck my whole dick.”

Eddie dropped his pajamas on the ottoman at the foot of the bed and stepped in close to Richie, hand pushing his iPhone to the side. “A thimble could suck your whole dick, bro.”

“_O-_kay, now we’re doing dick jokes,” Richie said, blinking owlishly at him from behind his glasses. Eddie honestly couldn’t tell if his eyes were that big or if his prescription was that absurd. “So we’re back to flirting? I thought we weren’t allowed to be flirting. I thought you hated me and my Smash Mouth cover band.”

“I do,” Eddie said, stepping back. “I find you extremely off-putting, actually.”

Richie refocused the iPhone on him. He had this stupid grin on his face like he — like he didn’t _believe_ Eddie, like he thought Eddie was just so ensorcelled with him, like he thought he was _charming_? Charming?_ This_ guy? Who looked like a paper doll designed and cut out by someone high on amphetamines? “And what exactly about me is so off-putting?”

“Your hair, first of all,” Eddie told him immediately, counting off on his fingers. “Your weird, spindly arms. The fact that everything you say is insane. The shirt you’re wearing, which has nearly blinded me. You smell like Axe body spray, who still uses Axe body spray? Also, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, _you set my hotel on fire!”_

“Honestly, Losers, we did his hotel a favor,” Richie told him, which served only to make Eddie madder. “Perhaps now he might be encouraged to redecorate. Though it was a shame for us, since it had just _extraordinary_ vibes. I’m talking The Shining. I’m talking Hill House. I’m talking Psycho. I’m talking any movie made by Wes Anderson, but in a world where Wes Anderson fell into a weird goth friendship group in his early teens and spent his teens sleeping upside down from the rafters like a bat.”

Eddie blinked. “The specificity of that makes me think that you definitely spent your teens sleeping upside down from the rafters like a bat. Also, what the fuck! Does that mean! What are you even talking about!”

“I’m talking about the Derry Inn as the number one murder destination on the east coast!”

“No one has been murdered there in _a while!”_ Richie started laughing and couldn’t stop, flopping onto the bed and covering his eyes with his arm. Eddie frowned at him, hands on his hips. “What are you laughing at!” he demanded. “Stop it!”

Richie shook his head helplessly. “No one has been murdered there in a while,” he managed, sounding choked. “Oh my God.”

There was something oddly delicate about him, laid out like that, though he certainly _wasn’t_ delicate. He looked like a nice boy from Oklahoma who went to Margaritaville one time and came back with a gambling addiction. He looked like the guy your sister dated in college who got her to start smoking weed. He looked like a younger version of the uncle that insisted on calling you “sport” and you were pretty sure it was because he didn’t know your name. He looked like that guy from SNL who did all the impressions. He looked like —

He looked like he was wearing loud clothes so that you’d be distracted by the noise of him, Eddie thought, which was such a weird and stupid and intense thought to have. He didn’t know this guy. He didn’t even like him. He just — he was fascinated by him, kind of, like you’d be fascinated by a dead body. Like you’d be fascinated by a bug you found in the street. Eddie wanted to poke him, but also, oddly, he wanted to move him from the sidewalk to the grass, like saving a worm come to light in the rain.

Whatever! Whatever. Eddie didn’t care. All of this was stupid.

“So how’d you come to own a hotel?” Richie asked, once he’d managed to get a hold of himself. He was wiping tears from his eyes. “You seem kind of young to have abandoned all hope and committed to becoming that guy in your small, weird town who jerks off in movie theaters.”

“Fuck you, I jerk off at home,” Eddie snapped, then blushed when Richie raised his eyebrows. “No! Fuck off, shut up, don’t say anything more about me jerking off. It’s my family’s. I inherited it. My mom is in an institution.”

Richie blinked. He sat up slowly, and Eddie looked away, keenly aware suddenly that the mood of the room had taken a sharp turn. “My dad died and she went nutballs crazy and tried to kill me with carbon monoxide poisoning. Whatever. It was a long time ago, it’s fine.”

It was last year, but Richie didn’t need to know that. Eddie didn’t owe Richie anything. 

“I’m sorry,” Richie said. His voice was soft. 

“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Eddie said, shrugging. “She was ... ” He trailed off. Overbearing. Manipulative. A hypochondriac. Plagued with Munchausen-by-proxy. She had hated his friends and tried to keep him from them, even though without them, Eddie wilted. She’d wanted him that way, he guessed. She’d liked him quiet. And then his dad had died and Eddie was all she’d had and she’d been convinced that he would go, too; that the world would take him and hurt him. So she wanted to save him, in her own, sick way. 

Eddie wasn’t saying it was okay, he was just saying, like, he knew why it happened. 

Richie was looking at him with eyes that Eddie couldn’t read. “I’m still sorry,” he said. “Maybe she was crazy but it’s still fucked.”

Eddie heard himself laugh, a little incredulously. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s still fucked.”

“But why did you keep the hotel?” Richie went on, cocking his head to the side. He was leaning back on his elbows, disheveled and lazy. 

He looked like a parody of what a person was supposed to be but between one minute and the next Eddie thought: _he looks good._ Stupid. So fucking messy and loud and stupid, but so good, too. Eddie wanted to nuzzle into the mess of him. He wanted to roll in it.

“Because it’s mine,” Eddie told him, not understanding the question. “She gave it to me. Who else is going to run it?”

Richie shrugged. “Nobody, if the Good Lord had any power left in the world,” he said dryly. “You’d sell the murder trap to some weird cheesemonger developing company and then get the hell out of this weird, terrible town.”

“Fuck you, it’s not a terrible town,” Eddie argued, even though he himself thought that Derry was, in fact, a terrible down.

“Edward. Eduardo. Eddie Spaghetti. This is the worst place in the world.”

“It’s a quaint and picturesque American masterpiece where families can raise their children,” Eddie said, sticking out his chin.

Richie’s eyebrows rose so high they disappeared into his bangs. “You _just_ told me that people get murdered here, horrifically, like once every decade.”

“... It’s not ... _every_ decade,” Eddie muttered. “Anyway, don’t fucking come for Derry when you live in Los Angeles, the undisputed world capital of douchebags.”

“I cannot and will not argue that point,” Richie agreed. “I’ve met the worst people in the world there, but they also met me, so.”

Eddie peered at him. He looked like the type of person who did not think he was among the worst people in the world. He looked like the type of person who waltzed into an acting class and gave the teacher notes, but in a sarcastic way, like he thought classes were stupid because all you needed was “real life experience.” 

Richie _looked like_ a lot of things, Eddie thought. He looked like so many things, you couldn’t pin them all down. It kept you busy, looking for them, trying to pick them out.

Eddie wanted to pin him down and pull them out like feathers, all the things he dressed himself up to be. He wanted to see the stupid, hairless bird underneath. He wanted to know whether, seeing it, he’d want to eat it, or love it, or both.

He said, “What the fuck did you even come here looking for, Richie Tozier?”

Richie looked away from him. He opened up his bag and pulled out pajama pants and a t-shirt. He answered, without looking: “We told you. We’re hunting that clown.”

Eddie shook his head, thought Richie couldn’t see it. He wanted an answer, a _real_ answer, not — whatever bullshit Richie said to keep people from hearing what he didn’t want them to. “I asked what _you_ came looking for.”

Richie yanked his terrible Hawaiian button-up off and pulled on a cotton monstrosity that said THIS IS A T-SHIRT. When he turned back around, he flicked a dry smile at Eddie and told him, “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Is there an echo in here? Aunt Miriam, babe, that you?”

“Then why are you here?”

“Mr. Spaghetti,” Richie said, “I don’t give a shit if there’s a clown or not. All my friends are here. Where else am I going to go?”

-

They all congregated in the kitchen. Eddie made a comment about Mike not liking the living room that was clearly borne of years of friendship that Bill wasn’t privy to. But Mike did break out cheese, pretzels, and a few bottles of wine from his wine cellar and the seven of them sat around drinking it and talking. Bill set up the camera but promised not to publish any footage that people didn’t approve first. He watched Stan, who took a seat between Richie and Bev, never quite looking at Bill.

What had he meant? 

What had he ... Stan wasn’t a mess. He was so careful. Everything he did was so _responsible_. He was the smartest, best person Bill knew, and the bravest, because he worried about things and did them anyway. Bill wasn’t like that. There wasn’t any bravery to Bill, he just did what he thought he was supposed to. What people needed him to do. 

“Let’s start with the house, and work our way up to the clown,” Bev directed. “Tell us about it.”

The three Derry boys shared a look, and then Ben sighed. “Okay, the thing about Derry is — ”

Eddie groaned. “Not the whole history lesson, Hanscom,” he begged. “You and your fucking conspiracy theories.”

“It’s not a _conspiracy theory,_” Ben argued. “It’s our town’s history, and it’s relevant. You just don’t like talking about it because you’re a superstitious baby.”

“I’m not a baby!”

“My dude, you are _king_ fucking baby,” Richie interjected, and at Eddie’s glare put his hands up on surrender. 

Ben cleared his throat. “_Anyway,_” he continued, “the thing about Derry is that it started as a beaver trapping town.”

“And it still is,” Richie said, raising his hand for a high five. Without looking at him, Stan pulled his hand down by the wrist. 

“It was one of the most prosperous in the whole northeast,” Ben went on, ignoring him. Bill thought he was acclimating well to Richie. “But then, in eighteen eighty-one, the Maine Gas & Electric came to town, and things began to fall apart. In nineteen-oh-one, a series of murders at MG&E shut the company down.”

Mike took a long sip from his wine glass. “The head offices were where the Neibolt stands now,” he said. “Nine people were killed.”

“Killed and _eaten_,” Eddie chimed in, with no small degree of relish. For someone who looked like he’d been designed by the makers of Build-A-Bear, that guy really had a mean streak, Bill thought. “They only ever recovered their _skulls.”_

“Gross,” said Richie, delightedly.

Bev punched his shoulder. “Ben, go on,” she said coaxingly. 

“After that, it happened— well, not irregularly,” Ben explained. “Brutal murders, a bunch all together, and then peace for a while. And always the Neibolt was at the center of it, or whatever was built on the lot where the Neibolt now stands. After MG&E it was a new schoolhouse, where the teacher slaughtered a whole class of children. And after that, the severed hands of four missing kids were found in the basement of the old library, built on the same spot. And then, in the fifties, a bunch of teenagers went missing; most were never found, but the torso of one of them showed up in the sewers beneath the house.”

“The earth remembers what happens on it,” Mike said darkly, into his wine. 

“It’s the _water_, man, I’m telling you,” Ben argued. “They pumped some pollutant or something into the — ”

“Aaaaand there’s the conspiracy theory,” Eddie interrupted. “Right on time. The evil overlords of water pollution that famously makes Mainers do murder.”

“Okay, fine, it’s a magical evil cosmic force that awakens in Derry every generation and eats its populace,” Ben returned sarcastically. “That makes _much_ more sense.”

Stan leaned in. In the half light of Mike’s kitchen, he was lit up, Bill thought. Like a painting, almost. Bill had always liked looking at him; it was soothing. It was just ... he just liked it, that was all.

“What about what happened six years ago?” he asked. “The most recent bout of murders.”

Without looking at him, Stan’s hand had come to rest on Bill’s thigh, patting it comfortingly as he asked. That was Stan for you: doing the hard thing, but as kindly as he could.

Eddie and Ben looked at Mike, who shifted uncomfortably. “Henry Bowers went nuts and killed five people in the abandoned Neibolt house,” he said plainly. “And then he was caught. So.”

“‘He was caught,’” Eddie mimicked, using finger quotes. “Mike caught him.”

“Technically you’re the one who stopped him from — ” Mike glanced at Bill and then away. “Well. We were both there.”

Bill’s chest tightened, and so did Stan’s grip. “I d-didn’t know that,” he said to Eddie. “Nobody ever t-t-t-told me.”

Eddie shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. “All I did was chuck a rock,” he muttered. “It’s not like I fought the guy hand to hand or anything.”

“That is ... fucking outstanding,” Richie said, his chin in his hands. “You’re like a tiny, angry squirrel. Just hurling nuts at passers by in case they might be serial murderers.”

“It took a killer arm to knock him down like that, though,” Ben complimented proudly.

“Yeah, thank God Eddie was really in a very intense masturbation phase, to build up those muscles,” said Mike, “because God knows he didn’t play sports.”

Eddie chucked a bit of cheese at him, which Mike caught in his mouth, to clearly his own surprise. He and Eddie immediately threw their hands up as if this had been intentional, fist bumping with both hands on the way down, all forgiven.

Stan’s hand slipped from Bill’s thigh and went back to his wine glass. Beside him, Bev joked, “Damn Richie, maybe your ghost hunting problem is that you need to jerk off more.”

“That’s _not_ his problem, please don’t encourage him,” Stan assured them all dryly. “Richie’s slut enough for ghosts.”

“True,” Richie agreed amicably, “but it’s okay, Stanley. Don’t be jealous. We will always have that night in the treehouse.”

Bill jerked his head so hard his neck went stiff and pinched. Bev whirled around to gape at Richie, jaw on the floor. “The _what_!” she cried. “What did you do to our sweet Stanley in a treehouse!”

Stan dropped his face into his hands, and Bill tried to picture it. How was it possible that he hadn’t known that Stan — and _Richie_ — ?

“Relax, Beverly, all we did was tongue a little.” Richie fluttered his eyelashes at Stan, who pointedly ignored him. “He was my first kiss. He said we could _practice._”

Horribly, Bill heard himself blurt incredulously, “_Richie _was your first kiss?!” 

“Oh, please don’t—” Stan began, but it was too late. Richie had begun gesturing with his wine glass. Looking resigned, Stan slid a napkin onto the table beneath him, to catch the spills.

“o-HO, wouldn’t you think so!” Richie cried. “Not so, Beverly. Our Stan was a right hussy, kissing girls all _over_ the kindergarten.”

“It was _one girl,_ her name was Patricia, and we were married in a lovely, understated ceremony at first recess,” Stan told them primly. 

“Consummated by snack time, I’ll bet,” Richie muttered. “But it all worked out for me, kids, because where is Patricia now?” He gestured meaningfully at the group. 

Stan smirked at him. “She works for a law firm in Atlanta,” he said, probably because he knew it would drive Richie insane. “She’s doing very well. We exchange Christmas cards. She calls you my work wife. Big fan of the show, actually.”

“Fuck Patricia, she’s not allowed to watch our show,” Richie declared. “I hate Patricia. In the second grade she told me I smelled like ham sandwiches.”

“Richie,” Stan said patiently, “you _did_ smell like ham sandwiches.”

“All the fucking _same_, Staniel. She’s my nemesis.”

Bill tried to keep his expression neutral. He didn’t know why the idea of Stan and Richie was so appalling to him, but there was just something so fundamentally _wrong _with it. They were Stan and Richie. It was like — they weren’t like brothers, exactly, but all the same, it ... Bill knew he wasn’t allowed to like or not like it but he didn’t like it. 

Though he supposed it made sense, that they’d have practiced on each other. Kids did that, and it didn’t mean anything. 

Unless that was what Stan had meant. _All your friends are a mess._

Holy shit: was Stan in love with Richie?

“Right,” Bev said, clapping her hands once. “Well, now that that absolutely horrifying detail has come to light, I think it’s time for the ghost hunters to do some actual ghost hunting.”

Richie’s eyes lit up. “Oh!” he cried. “We’re going to meet Aunt Miriam!”

“A lecherous old lady, Rich, she’s just your type,” Stan said cheerfully, getting to his feet.

“I really cannot believe everybody insists on roasting my Aunt Miriam like this,” Mike grumbled, also standing. “She was a nice old lady.”

“Please, you never met Miriam once in your life,” Eddie dismissed. He had clambered up onto Ben and was being carried piggy-back. “She died in like 1260BC.”

“She died in nineteen seventy-four.”

“Well there you go.”

“My gramps said — ”

“Mike,” Ben interrupted gently, turning so that both he and Eddie could give Mike identical glares, “fuck your gramps.”

Mike made a face, but didn’t argue, and anyway they had arrived at the portrait room. Bill thought to ask, but he had grabbed the camera on his way out of the living room and wasn’t sure if it would be appropriate. He wouldn’t want to talk about _his_ family on camera.

“Here it is,” Eddie said, voice hushed. “The most haunted room in the house, where the ghosts of horny dead aunts reside.”

Bill swung the camera to take in Aunt Miriam. Richie and Stan stood on either side of her, perfectly framed. She was an older black woman, with wrinkled eyes and hair long and free, haloing around her head. She wore a peasant top and sat on a fancy but clearly well-worn chair, hands folded in her lap, a chicken sitting in the circle of them. She didn’t looked scary, to Bill. She looked exactly like what you’d think someone named Aunt Miriam to look like.

Mike leaned in and murmured, “See? I told you. She’s just a normal portrait.”

“Eddie,” Richie said, “quick, get your dick out. Maybe that’ll prompt something.”

“Okay,” said Bill, “Richie, stop harassing our new friends and do your job.”

Richie and Stan both looked over their shoulders at him. That was going to be the thumbnail, Bill knew already: Richie and Stan giving him disdainful looks with poor Aunt Miriam in the background. “Fine,” Richie said, “but I really think this would go better if Eddie had his dick out.”

Stan made a face at the camera. “I really thought, when I got into ghost hunting, that it would have a significantly lower number of dick jokes in it, as a profession.”

“Well, that was dumb,” Richie told him. “_You_ hired _me._”

“You _volunteered_,” Stan argued. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now, I’m resigned to you.” He turned back to face Aunt Miriam and took a deep breath, pulling the spirit box out of his back pocket. Richie made a face and clapped his hands over his ears, glaring. “Aunt Miriam, if you’re with us, I’m going to turn on a device that might help you to communicate, okay?”

“Boys, you’re going to want to cover your ears for this,” Richie grumbled. “It’s the segment of the show called Stan Tries To Make His Friends’ Ears Bleed.”

Stan flicked him off without looking at him. He turned on the spirit box and the clicking and static filled the air; Bill winced. It wasn’t as bad as Richie made it sound but it was, admittedly, not a good sound. It was a bitch to get the levels right afterwards, in post, but that was Stan’s job, so as long as he didn’t mind doing it, Bill wasn’t going to tell him not to use the devil machine.

“Aunt Miriam, my name is Stanley Uris, and this is Richie Tozier. We’re joined by our friends, one of which is your nephew, Mike. Mike, say hi.”

Bill turned the camera to look at Mike, who seemed suddenly bashful, hand going up to the back of his neck. “Uh,” he said. “Hi, Aunt Miriam. Sorry, I don’t — I mean. I don’t think she can hear me. Because she’s dead.”

“Mike, be polite, if she _can_ hear you, you’re going to make her mad,” Ben scolded. He glanced at the portrait, then Richie and Stan, then Bev, then down at his hands. “I mean. Isn’t it better to be polite just in _case_.”

“Ben, you beautiful himbo,” Richie told him, “I assure you that even if Aunt Miriam is alive, she’s not going to talk to us through Stan’s broken radio.” 

“It’s not a _broken —_ ”

“ — ICE BOY — ANNERS — ” said the spirit box, and everyone went silent, except for Eddie, who screamed and tried to steer Ben out of the room like he was a pony. Bill had gotten too used to this job to jump, but his grip tightened on the camera anyway. He wasn’t sure he believed in the spirit box, but he didn’t ... _not_ believe in it. Sometimes it did sound like it was responding, when Stan talked to it. Sometimes Bill wasn’t sure.

Richie was always sure of things, Bill thought. And when he wasn’t, he just winged it. 

Richie and Stan looked at one another. Bev clapped her hands over her mouth. Carefully, respectfully, Stan said, “Ice boy? Nanners?”

“Stan, it’s obvious. She thinks that Ben is Vanilla Ice,” Richie whispered knowledgeably, looking at the camera with a flat expression. “And she wants some bananas. Oh! Maybe that’s a metaphor. You know, for — ”

“_Richie_,” Stan hissed. “Aunt Miriam, my name is Stan, and this is Richie. He’s an idiot, sorry. Can you say our names back to us?”

The spirit box said, “SKKKRRRRTTT, zhhhhhhhhzit! SHHHHHHHHKTKTKT.”

Richie nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Very interesting, Aunt Miriam. That’s a sick beat. Ben, give her some of that Vanilla Ice flow, she’s not going to ask twice.”

“hsssssSOME,” said the spirit box. “I — KSRRRRRT! — UNSAFE. CL — ch. ch. chchchchchchchchchch. OW. nnnnnnERP.”

“Unsafe?” Stan repeated. He looked over at Bill, wide-eyed. “That was pretty clear. She said ‘unsafe,’ right?”

Ben was nodding. Eddie was yanking on his left ear, trying to get him to turn. Mike stood very still, frowning. “I heard ‘unsafe’ pretty clearly,” Ben said. “Mike?”

“I heard it,” Mike confirmed.

“We all heard it,” Richie said. “Because it’s a radio. And it picks up radio frequencies. Stan, you know my rule about spirit box evidence.”

Stan sighed. “Aunt Miriam, I’m really sorry, but it’s — can you say our names? Mine, or Richie’s, or even Mike’s?”

“Aunt Miriam, can you say, ‘Richie Tozier is the hottest ghost hunter on television’?”

“Aunt Miriam, can you say, ‘Richie Tozier isn’t _on_ television’?”

Richie pointed a finger at Eddie without turning around. “Oh, now you’re brave enough to engage,” he grumbled. “Come on, Aunt Miriam. Give us something good.”

Silence. Bill held his breath. 

And then the spirit box said, clear as anything, clean as a church bell: “DICKS,” and Bill was glad he had the camera pointed at Richie’s face, to catch the joy in it.

-

Ben slept in with Mike, because Mike thought his Aunt Miriam shouting “dicks” at them was so funny that he let it go without a fight. When they were growing up, Mike was really strict about making Ben sleep on the floor, because Ben was a sleep kicker, but since he’d taken over the farm and moved into the guest bedroom he had loosened the policy. Ben figured it was because the California king mattress meant not even Ben’s long legs could reach him.

In the morning, he woke the moment Mike did, because Mike was simply incapable of being quiet until he’d been awake for at least an hour and a half. Between getting out of bed and making it to the bathroom, he knocked into four pieces of furniture and said, “Well, shit,” six times. Ben blinked at the ceiling for a bit and then said to the ceiling as Mike peed, door open: “They’re weird, aren’t they?” 

He didn’t mean it as an insult. Lots of things that Ben liked were weird. His mother had texted him _goodnight sweet baby boy_ without a dose of irony last night, so. It’s not like he had much high ground.

“Benny, they’re weird as shit,” Mike confirmed, coming out of the bathroom drying his hands with a towel. He dropped it on the floor, like the neanderthal he and Eddie were. With Mike Ben supposed it made sense, but he didn’t understand how Eddie could be such a hypochondriac and such a gross, messy boy at the same time. “You like that redhead, though.”

Ben grinned. “She said she thinks I’m hot,” he said. “So I think I have a chance.” 

Mike laughed, pausing to wait at the foot of the bed until Ben reluctantly rolled off and onto his feet. “Well, so does Richie,” he pointed out in a whisper as they crept down to the kitchen. “Maybe you guys could have a — ”

“_Mike_,” Ben hissed, glancing around to see if anyone else had woken before them. But the kitchen was empty. Mike rolled his eyes, chuckling. He put the coffee on and then leaned against the counter, arms folded patiently across his chest.

“Ben, we’re adults,” he pointed out. “What was it Ms. Mustafah used to say in Home Ec? _If you can’t even talk about sex without blushing you aren’t ready to be having sex_.”

Ben felt himself flush, but he landed a good punch on Mike’s arm. Of the three of them, Mike had always had the easiest time, with girls. He just had a quiet comfort to him, a sense of settled-ness that felt so soothing to be around. None of them were exactly ladykillers in high school or after, but Mike had been the one who, when he wanted, could go out and stand at a bar and wait. 

“I have game, okay,” grumbled Ben, who didn’t. 

It wasn’t that he was embarrassed. Ben wasn’t a _virgin_, all right; he’d bulked up when he joined the fire department. It was just that — sex had always felt ... intense, to Ben. It made him feel close to whoever he was with, because by definition that’s what they were: close. As close as two people could be. Ben didn’t think that there was anything _morally_ wrong with casual sex, he just didn’t _get_ it. Why would you do the most intimate, vulnerable, exposing thing in the world with someone you didn’t even like, much less love? Ben didn’t even play Scrabble with people he didn’t like. He certainly wasn’t about to get naked with them.

Mike laughed again, warm and fond. “You abso_lutely_ do not,” he corrected. “But it’s okay. I think she’s probably got enough game for both of you.”

Back in LA, he’d met Bev a handful of times, each of them outside her smoking apartment. Or — the smoking apartment, he guessed. He’d assumed that she and Richie, or she and Stan, or she and Stan and Richie, had something going on. He’d thought, how could someone like that, someone who burned so bright her apartment kept bursting into flames, be anything other than loved, surrounded, doted on? Each time he’d shown up they’d been jocular and fun, joking with each other outside the apartment, so fast and smart it had seemed almost like watching a movie.

Ben wasn’t like that. He was quiet, and not very funny, and nerdy but only about a small handful of things nobody else cared about, like Derry history and World War II cartography and _Fullmetal Alchemist_. Nobody had ever paid him much attention, except for Mike and Eddie, and in some ways, especially since moving, he wondered whether he hadn’t just been, like, grandfathered into their friendship. Of course they loved him but would they love him newly, if they met him now, if the history wasn’t there?

Mike was peering at him. “Oh, Ben,” he said, voice gentle. “You’ve got that look. That Greta Bowie in seventh grade look. Buddy — ”

“Shut up,” Ben said. “It’s not like that.”

“You barely know her,” Mike reminded him.

“Eddie barely knows Richie and everyone’s all on board for that!”

Mike nudged him with his shoulder. “That’s because nobody is actually worried that they’re going to, like, fall in love and get hurt by each other. They’re just ... gonna fight and maybe fuck once and then Richie is going to leave and everything will go back to normal. You’re going to follow them back to LA and let that girl break your heart.”

Ben looked over, surprised; he raised his eyebrows. “Do you really think that?” he asked. 

“I don’t know how to say, ‘You fall in love with literally everyone you meet and get your heart bruised so much it probably looks like an aged peach,’ in a gentle way,” Mike told him dryly.

Ben waved a hand, dismissing him not because he was wrong but because that’s not what Ben meant. “Do you really think that Eddie and Richie couldn’t hurt each other?” he clarified. 

“Well,” said Mike, frowning. “I mean. Yeah?”

The coffee maker beeped. Ben went to pour two cups of coffee and added cream to his, cream and sugar to Mike’s. He tried to figure out how to say what he was thinking: that Ben bruised more easily than Eddie, but Eddie took longer to heal when he took a hit. That Eddie was better at dodging but it meant that the ones that landed knocked him fully off his feet. 

People who knew Eddie either thought he was a delicate flower or that he was a tiny, angry stinging nettle but the truth lay somewhere in between. Like a hedgehog, maybe. A furious little hedgehog.

“Eddie’s never ... with a boy, I mean,” Ben pointed out. 

Mike made a face. “Eddie’s definitely had sex with men before,” he corrected, with the air of someone who was trying very hard not to imagine his friend doing any kind of sexual activity at all. “Remember the weekend that we all went out to Bangor — ”

“Yeah, but not in _Derry_,” Ben said. “He’s always been so careful. He isn’t being careful.”

“That was before his mom. Maybe ... maybe now that she’s gone, he feels like he doesn’t have to — ”

“Michael, please,” Ben interrupted. “You know as well as I do that Eddie did all kinds of things his mother explicitly forbade, it was like his one joy in life. Remember when he managed to keep a pet chinchilla secret for like six months?”

Mike laughed. “Remember when he tried to get a tattoo but then passed out with fear in the parlor because he didn’t trust their needles?”

“Remember when he suspected he didn’t have asthma so he joined the track team?”

“He won the state finals!”

“Well, he’s very fast when he is fleeing.”

Eddie’s track career had ended after that year, because the coach called his mom and told her excitedly that she thought Eddie could be eligible for a track and field college scholarship. Ben’s mom had begged him to join track, probably hoping that he would lose weight; instead, they’d put him on shot put and he’d bulked up. Ben had liked it. He’d liked feeling strong, instead of just big. He’d liked the way it made the football team wary of him and less likely to pick on his friends.

Mike took a long sip of coffee. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” he asked. “That they showed up, total strangers, and just ... suddenly we were seven? It’s never been that way. As a group, historically, we haven’t been all that welcoming.”

Ben considered. Eventually he said, “Well — Bill Denbrough isn’t exactly a stranger. He’s Georgie’s brother. You love Georgie. You _saved_ Georgie.” 

“Eddie threw the rock,” Mike said, shoulders hunching. “I just carried him.”

“He’d have died if you didn’t,” Ben pointed out. Mike has always shied away from credit for catching Bowers; Ben didn’t know why. “And anyway, no way Eddie would have thrown the rock if you weren’t there. You know he’d have just talked shit to distract him and then run for help.”

“Eddie can fight.”

“Yeah, you and I know that, but he forgets.”

Mike laughed. “I think he suspects sometimes,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “He thinks he’s weak until someone tells him he is.”

“A hedgehog,” Ben agreed. “That’s what I was thinking earlier. Cute and little until someone tries to pick him up.”

Mike held his coffee up in a salute of agreement. “I’m glad you came home,” he said quietly, not quite meeting Ben’s eyes. “I — we miss you, when you’re gone.”

Ben felt himself flushing. He stared down into his coffee cup and tried to school his expression. “Something always ... it’s like something in me wants me to leave,” he admitted. He’d never tried to explain before why he felt the urge to go. “Like it keeps pushing me out. But then once I’m gone, I feel like I start to forget home, you know? And I don’t want to. I don’t want to forget you, and Eddy, and my mom. I don’t know. It sounds crazy.”

“Nah,” Mike said. “Eddie feels like that sometimes, I think. He only stays because of his mom.”

“Whom he should stop visiting.”

“Buddy, who're you telling?”

Ben laughed. “And you?” he asked curiously. “You never want out?”

Mike didn’t answer for a long second. Eventually he mused, “The earth remembers what happens on it, and I think — we were its custodians here for so long. It remembers me, I think. I couldn’t leave it. It doesn’t want me to.”

“Spooky,” said a voice from behind them, and both Ben and Mike jerked their heads up to see Bev standing in the doorway in a big t-shirt that said TRASH MOUTH on it and boxers that went almost sown to her knees. She was wearing truly horrific corgi-themed grandpa socks. 

She grinned at them, coming more fully into the kitchen. Ben blushes at the way her shirt rode up as she grabbed a coffee mug from the open cupboard, pouring herself some and then hopping up onto the island counter across from them.

She watched them for a moment, and Ben and Mike watched her back. She was sizing them up, Ben thought. She was waiting to see — what? What was she looking for?

What did she want to see?

Mike said, “Good morning, Beverly,” and Bev broke out into a big, bright smile that didn’t quite meet her eyes. 

_She wants us to like her, _Ben thought. He knew because it was his Fireman Smile, the one he used when he wanted people in burning structures to follow him and not panic. 

“Good morning, Michael.”

“Mike is fine.”

“So is Bev.”

“I’m Ben,” said Ben, and then immediately wanted to kill himself. 

Bev turned her gaze on him, warm and amused. She did like them, Ben thought. She _did. _But she — but Ben knew, had seen it in Mike and in Eddie, that look that said that her liking them was only half the equation. That the bigger number was to do with ... with what she thought they wanted of her. With how she was supposed to behave.

Eddie with his mom was quiet. Meek. Mike with his grandfather had been someone Ben had never been able to recognize: tough and mean and uninterested in the _why_ of things. 

Who was Bev when she wasn’t paying attention?

“Hi Ben,” she greeted, voice a little softer than it had been. 

He liked the attention, he liked the favoritism, but she knew that, he thought. She was giving him what he wanted out of her. She was tough with Mike and soft with Ben and what he wanted was —

Was —

“Who’s Trash Mouth?” he asked, instead of saying anything else.

-

Bev could admit it: the question threw her. The abruptness of it. The question, and the way he looked at her in naked contemplation, like he didn’t know that she could read it on his face.

She looked down at her shirt to hide the flush in her cheeks of feeling wrong-footed. “Oh, it’s — Richie’s cover band. They do mostly Smash Mouth songs.”

Across from her, Mike chuckled. Mike, Bev got. He was simple. He loved his friends, he liked to think, he wanted to be left in quiet. Also he had the look to him, here in his own kitchen, that Bev had back when she’d been left alone in her dad’s house. The look of knowing you’re alone but not trusting that the safety of aloneness could shatter at any time. Putting things away exactly where you picked them up from, just in case. Just to be sure that no one could track where you’d been.

Ben was frowning in puzzlement. “Are they ... good?” he asked. He was cute, Bev thought. He was the Hot Fireman, yes, but worse than that: he was _cute_. He kind of reminded her of Stan, in Stan’s softer moments. 

He’d had a nickname for her. He blushed when she smiled. She’d thought she’d got it, but here he was, not picking up her signals.

Maybe he was awkward? Maybe he was saving himself for marriage?

“Well, they’re a _Smash Mouth cover band,_” she reiterated dryly. “So, you know. For a given value of good.”

“Smash Mouth was okay,” Ben mused. “They were kind of climate change activists in a way. Plus: Shrek.”

“Oh, Shrek is undeniable,” Mike agreed quickly, pointing an agreeing finger in Ben’s direction. “The cultural cachet of Shrek alone might rescue it.”

Bev laughed, an honest laugh, and then took a sip of coffee, giving them first a conciliatory salute with it. They raised theirs back: an accord.

They sat for a moment, drinking peacefully; Bev was thinking about the shoot. Daytime shoots were never as good as nighttime shoots, but she didn’t think there was any way they’d get the Derry boys to the house at night. Plus, she didn’t know what Georgie would want.

To come? To stay behind?

Which would help more?

“So today we do the Neibolt,” she told Mike and Ben bracingly. “I assume we are going in the daylight or else Eddie will bite holes in our tires.”

They exchanged glances. “Look, Bev,” Mike said, not ungently. “I just don’t think — I’m not sure what I believe, about ghosts. But I know that weird shit happens at the Neibolt. Why chase it down?”

Bev leaned back on her elbows. She studied them both: two boys, born and bred in a place where gruesome murder — not violence, but _murder_ — was common. Two boys who had each other and, as far as she could tell, not much else. Bev was good at snap judgments. She was good at knowing who people were and what they’d want.

These boys loved each other. They wanted to be gentle but weren’t always given the option. Mike hadn’t liked credit for saving Georgie; Ben had seemed, at best, sheepish about being a fireman. Two large men who wanted to go unnoticed.

Why?

What _was it_ about this town?

“What if we can stop it?” she asked. “Georgie said he thinks another round of deaths is coming. What if we can prevent them?”

“What if we can’t?” 

Bev craned over her shoulder to find Eddie standing in the doorway. He had his hands wrapped tightly around his middle.

“Eddie,” said Ben, as gentle as he’d been with Bev, maybe gentler. 

Eddie shook his head. “What if there isn’t any stopping it?” he went on. “People go into the Neibolt and they go crazy. They stay _out_ of the Neibolt and they go crazy. People just _go crazy here_. Maybe it’s in our fucking DNA, I don’t know. But you can’t stop crazy. You can’t — you can’t. You just can’t.”

“You can if something makes them go crazy,” Bev pointed out. “Maybe Ben is right and it’s in the water.”

“And your prestigious internet ghost hunting show is going to expose it?” Eddie turned around sharply. He looked so tense. Bev didn’t understand. “You and whatever grade school chemistry set you brought with you to test for — whatever, ectoplasm? _You’re _going to save Derry?”

Bev blinked at him. She took him in. _Back off_, she thought to herself. Now was when you de-escalated. Now was when you soothed.

But — it was _Georgie. _It was Georgie, and Bill. She’d only just met Eddie and Mike and Ben. Georgie and Bill were family. Richie and Stan were family.

Bev had made a new family when her original turned out to be worthless. She wasn’t letting go of it.

“Maybe,” she told Eddie evenly. “We’re at least going to try.”

“You think _we_ haven’t tried?” snapped Eddie, and Ben pushed off the counter, putting his coffee down. “What, you think everyone here just sits around with our thumbs up our asses — ”

“I didn’t say — ”

“Eddie — ”

“Don’t _Eddie_ me, Benjamin — ”

“I’m just trying to calm everyone d— ”

“PEOPLE. GO. CRAZY,” Eddie shouted, stomping his foot. Everyone else snapped their mouths shut. Behind him, Stan and Bill paused on the base of the stairs. “OKAY? THEY JUST _GO CRAZY SOMETIMES_.”

Mike put his coffee down. He wove around the island in silence and went to where Eddie was standing, putting his hand on his shoulder. Ben followed close behind and put his hand on the other shoulder. 

Bill met Bev’s eyes, looking alarmed. She made a helpless gesture; fuck if she knew what was going on.

“Not everybody,” Mike said, softly. “_Eddie_. Not everybody.”

“People who go into the Neibolt do,” Eddie muttered. He pulled his hands away from his waist and stared at them. “People who spend the night.”

“Not all of them,” said Ben. “Not the ones who have people to come and get them.”

Eddie looked up. Bev felt herself holding her breath. “I’m not going back in,” he said. His voice was steady. “I’m sorry. I’m not. I can’t.”

“You don’t have to,” Bev promised him. “No one has to go in who doesn’t want to.”

Eddie nodded at her once, sharply, and then turned on his heel and left the kitchen, going back upstairs without another word. If he acknowledged Bill and Stan, Bev didn’t see it.

“Maybe that’s why,” Ben said, turning to look at Mike. 

“Hmm?”

“Why he doesn’t leave,” Ben clarified. He looked back at Bev and there was something in his eyes she couldn’t read. “There’s no one out there to go get him.”

-

The energy in the car was, to put it mildly, _fucking weird. _

Richie jiggled his leg until Stan put a stern hand on his knee. He widened his eyes to say _well, but what the fuck!!!_ and Stan hit him back with a very clear _grown up stuff do NOT bring it up. _But fuck that, Richie came out to have a good time and he was not going to waste it because somebody fucked up the group chi, or whatever. Admittedly Richie was a little fuzzy on the details of chi.

He opened his mouth and Stan clapped a hand over it. He licked his palm and Stan yelped, wiping his hand on his shirt. 

“Richie! What the fuck!”

“Talk shit, get licked, Stanley.”

“I didn’t say anything!”

Richie batted his eyelashes. “You spoke with your _body language_,” he said. “Anyway don’t play innocent, you’re oppressing my right to free speech.”

Stan pinched the bridge of his nose. Bill and Georgie twisted around in the front seat, Georgie with interest and Bill with that special Tired Dad Denbrough look. Bill turned back around when the light turned green and went back to driving. Mike had driven them back to the hotel after breakfast to get Bill’s car and then gone to open the library. Eddie had stormed back into their room, grabbed his clothes, and stomped off again. Richie hadn’t seen him since. Only Ben had agreed to go to the Neibolt with them, and was following behind in his own car.

With exceeding dryness, Stan said: “Once again Rich I must remind you that free speech protects you from persecution by the government, not from the judgment of your friends.”

Richie shrugged. “Same thing,” he dismissed. “Anyway I just wanted to ask why it is tenser in here than a clenched — ” 

He snapped his mouth shut, remembering Georgie, and amended: “... jaw.”

“Thank you, Richie,” Bill said wryly. 

“Anytime, Big Bill.”

“I know he was going to say butt,” grumbled Georgie.

Richie could not have been more delighted by that response. He loved Georgie. Georgie was the superior Denbrough, for sure. “Georgie, I can promise you honestly that I wasn’t going to say butt.”

On the far side of Stan, Bev leaned over to be able to see Richie. “There was a disagreement over breakfast,” she said.

Richie frowned. That couldn’t be right. “Wait, you guys had breakfast? With_out_ me?”

“It was a liquid breakfast,” Bev amended.

“You guys got _day drunk _without me?!”

Stan slumped, glaring up at the roof of the car. “It was just coffee, Rich. Bev and your new boyfriend got into a fight.”

Richie bit back on the instinct to argue that Eddie wasn’t his boyfriend, because as much as Richie loved a semantic argument he could smell a distraction tactic a mile away. “Bev, was that tiny monster bullying you?” he asked instead. 

In the front seat, Georgie laughs. “Eddie’s okay,” he said. “Sometimes he comes to the library to hang out with Mike when there’s nobody staying at the motel. We do trivia and Eddie knows the medical names for _everything_. Eddie can spell ost-e-o-por-o-sis.” He said _osteoporosis_ slowly and carefully, tripping over the syllables.

Billy frowned over at him. “I can spell osteoporosis,” he protested, like Eddie’s spelling abilities were a direct challenge to his status as Georgie’s Favorite Person On The Planet. Poor Bill. He didn’t know that he’d already lost that title to Bev.

“So do it then,” Georgie prompted skeptically.

“O-s-t-e-o ..... porosis,” Bill muttered. Bev gave one of her shout-laughs and Bill glared at her in the rearview mirror. “Well, do _you_ know how to spell it?” he demanded.

“O-s-t-e-o-p-e-r-o-s-i-s,” said Bev.

Stan made a loud buzzer sound. “Incorrect,” he informed her. “It’s p-O-r-o-s-i-s. Greek root ‘poro,’ meaning porous.”

Richie looped an arm over Stan’s neck and gave him a noogie, because he loved him so much. “Stan took _one_ Greek classics class in college and suddenly he’s Donna Tartt.”

“Who’s Donna Tartt?”

“The devil,” Richie told Georgie. “She wrote one good book in the nineties and sad English majors have been jerking off to her ever since.”

“I liked The Little Friend,” said Stan, and Richie tightened his neckhold. “And if you really want to get into it, there were elements of The Goldfinch that — ”

“The Goldfinch sucked and you know it sucked,” Richie told him, digging his knuckles into the top of Stan’s head until he squirmed away. “Bev, you did comp lit, back me up on this.”

Bev grinned over at him. “The Goldfinch positioned itself to ask really interesting questions about art and grief,” she told him primly, which was some real bullshit because Richie was _there_ when Bev threw her copy at the wall so hard she knocked a hole in the plaster that they then had to hide from their landlord with an oversized plant that nobody would take responsibility for keeping alive. “And then failed entirely to ask them.”

“Theo Decker sucks,” Richie explained to Georgie. “If anyone asks you in your sixth grade English class.”

“Wasn’t the point of Theo Decker that he sucked?” asked Bill, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“Oh, a shitty white dude who likes art,” Bev muttered. “Revolutionary.”

Richie reached out for a high-five, which Bev took. He felt rather than saw Stan give the dashcam a look so flat Richie could have slid it under a locked door. Honestly, this episode was going to be a mess. 

Which reminded him, actually: “Hey, wait. You guys distracted me. What happened this morning?”

“Eddie really did not want to go to the Neibolt,” Bev explained, bringing her hands to either side of Bill’s headrest and leaning forward to make sure the camera would see her. “He seemed really freaked out by it. He thinks it makes people go crazy.”

Georgie nodded seriously. “It’s because that’s where It lives,” he said, as if that should be obvious. “Well, actually I think It lives in the sewers beneath.”

Bill visibly stiffened, but didn’t say anything. He looked very busy driving, suddenly, which Richie supposed he got, because Bill was raised by WASPs and anything approaching an emotionally honest or vulnerable conversation was anathema to them. Richie’s parents met while following Phish and his dad has his name legally changed to Butterfly in the seventies, so. Richie was fine being the one to say: “When you say It, do you mean your clown friend?”

“He’s not my _friend_,” Georgie corrected sourly. “He’s this, like, crazy cannibal monster ghost monster. He’s the one who cut my arm off.”

In the rearview, Bill and Bev exchanged glances. Bev said gently, “Georgie, the man who hurt you — ”

“Clown,” Georgie corrected. “I don’t think It’s a man.”

“Kind of a mean thing to say about clowns,” Richie muttered, and received a fierce elbow to the gut from Stan. 

In the front seat, Bill sighed. “I just want to state for the record that I don’t think we’re going to find anything,” he said, to the car and to the camera. “Georgie, I know you went through something unimaginable, but I promise Henry Bowers is locked away and Henry Bowers is the one responsible. Stan, edit this bit out in the final.” 

“Obviously.”

Georgie turned back around to the front, crossing his good arm over his chest. “I thought you’d believe me,” he said. “Nobody else does, not mom and dad, not anybody, but I thought _you_ would.”

“Georgie ... ”

Before Bill could finish his thought, they pulled up in front of the house, and all of them fell silent, staring at it.

Richie had to hand it to the place: if it _wasn’t_ haunted, it was doing an absolutely amazing job of impersonating a house that was haunted as fuck. Decayed, overrun with dead and dying ivy, windows boarded up; if Richie had to pick the set of a haunted movie this is exactly what he would pick. It felt like it had been plucked from any one of his scariest imaginings as a child.

There was definitely, 100% for sure a ghost in there, if there were ghosts anywhere in the world.

Bill said, “Actually, you know what? Georgie isn’t coming in.”

“What!” Georgie cried. “_Bill!_”

“That place is a death trap,” Bill said firmly. “Mom will flay me alive if you fall through the floor and break something.”

“To be fair, he has one less thing to break than the rest of us,” Richie pointed out, and dodged Stan’s incoming elbow by tumbling out of the car. Bev followed his lead, and then Stan, but Georgie stayed in the front seat refusing to look at or speak to Bill. 

“Stop being an asshole,” Bev told him quietly as they got the nice camera out of the trunk. “He’s having a hard time being home.”

Richie rolled his eyes. “Bev, if I’m nice to Bill for even one single second he’s going to think I’m dying,” he said. “Anyway, Bill likes when I’m a turd, it makes him feel superior.”

“It does _not_,” Stan defended, setting up the boom and grabbing two mics. He clipped on his own and then went to work on Richie. “Bill doesn’t think he’s superior.”

“Bill can hear you,” Bill said as he got out of the front seat, casting one last look back at Georgie. “Thank you, Stan.”

Stan tossed him a salute and then dragged Richie out to the front of the house. Standing shoulder to shoulder, Richie waited for Bill to get the angle he wanted and then gestured grandly behind him. “Well Losers, I gotta say, if anywhere on earth there is an establishment that is full of ghosts, I think it is pretty obvious that it is this beautiful nightmare palace. It’s probably a ghost brothel in there.”

“Welcome to the Neibolt House,” Stan clarified. “As Eddie was saying yesterday, this house now stands on the spot in Derry where a host of bizarre and gruesome murders have taken place. Our friend Ben believes it’s to do with pollution from the old gas and electric company, but others think something more supernatural is at play. Could it be that some malignant spirit haunts the halls of this place, twisting the minds of passersby to do its violent bidding?”

“_Orrrrr_,” said Richie, “could this finally be the day that I get a ghoulfriend? When my spectral sex tape drops, I want you all to download it and let me know what you think. I’m working on an ab and I think it’s really going to pop on camera.”

“Why _are you_ this way?” Stan groaned. “I know your parents. Your parents are ... actually, you know what, in hindsight, maybe I kind of know why you are how you are.”

“Leave Maggie and Butterfly alone,” Richie protested.

“I rest my case.”

Behind the camera, Bill snorted. “All right. Let’s go in and get this over with.”

Richie took a moment to look at him, and Bev, and Georgie in the car; he grinned over at Stan, whose yarmulke looked warm in the sunlight. It felt good to be here, in a weird way. It felt right. Richie thought this episode was going to be one of the best they’d ever done. Maybe, when they were done filming, he’d find that mad little weirdo and make him go on a date. Richie thought he probably wanted to. They could yell at each other over waffles somewhere.

Together, the four of them turned and went into the house.


	3. if you're gonna kill a bunch of people, you might as well have some fun with it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He felt a twinge of guilt about not going to the Neibolt, but also, it really wasn’t his job, and if a bunch of strangers wanted to make a bad mistake, that was their prerogative. Mike was a town employee. He couldn’t just not show up for work. 
> 
> He was just opening up his copy of the Derry Daily Journal to read about the ongoing debate over whether or not to demolish the old movie theater now that they had the new one when, outside his window, Georgie Denbrough plowed his brother’s car into the handicap parking sign.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well folks!!!! that's it. it's done. probably this takes place in one of the dimensions that Young Richie saw during his turtle dream, not that it matters. anyway subscribe to GET IN LOSERS on youtube.*
> 
> **CWs for this chapter:**
> 
> \- so much blood and general gore  
\- reference to past abuse  
\- really horrific fatphobic language  
\- reference to suicide  
\- everything that’s in the book basically

Mike had a quiet morning, after all the ruckus had settled down. He’d taken the _Get In _crew back to Eddie’s motel — the damage was somehow both worse than Richie made it sound and better than Eddie did. They would definitely have to close that section of the building for a couple weeks, but it wasn’t like they were constantly turning guests down, so Mike didn’t imagine Eddie would take much of a hit. 

He went to the library to open and made himself a pot of tea with lemon. He restocked all the books that had been returned yesterday and overnight. He debated for the eight hundred millionth time reorganizing the supply room, and then instead went online to shop for some new titles. He checked in on the librarian’s support forum and wrote what he felt was honest and thoughtful advice to a question about managing kids with special requirements. 

He felt a twinge of guilt about not going to the Neibolt, but also, it really wasn’t his job, and if a bunch of strangers wanted to make a bad mistake, that was their prerogative. Mike was a town employee. He couldn’t just _not show up _for work. 

He was just opening up his copy of the _Derry Daily Journal _to read about the ongoing debate over whether or not to demolish the old movie theater now that they had the new one when, outside his window, Georgie Denbrough plowed his brother’s car into the handicap parking sign.

-

It had happened so fast.

By the time Ben pulled up to the Neibolt, the _Get In _crew were already inside. Only Georgie was left behind, sitting furiously on the hood of the car throwing rocks at the woods. Ben had sat down next to him and waited patiently until he’d grumbled, “They went inside. With_out _me.”

“That’s because they love you,” Ben had told him, though privately he was torn. Leaving him alone seemed like just as bad an idea as bringing him into that worn-down death trap of a house. But then, thus far none of the group had displayed particularly good decision-making skills. “And look, they left me too.”

Georgie has smiled a little. “Yeah but that’s just ’cause you drive like my grandma.”

“Why I never, Georgie Denbrough,” Ben had joked. “The libel. The _slander._ Does your mother know you’re this rude?”

Georgie had laughed, and looked at Ben, and he’d been looking just like that when there was a crash inside the house and suddenly Georgie’s face went white. “Pennywise,” he’d said, pointing, but when Ben turned around he didn’t see a clown. 

He saw a house on fire. There were figures shadowed in the upstairs window. Ben could hear Embers screaming.

“Get back in the car, Georgie. Don’t breathe the smoke,” Ben commanded, and ran into the house. 

-

Bev didn’t know what happened. She didn’t know how they’d been separated. She barely knew where she _was _anymore. In one minute she was standing in the upstairs bathroom with her arms holding the boom at an awkward angle to keep off camera and in the next, the door had shut and she was standing alone, staring at herself in the mirror.

“Hello, Embers,” her reflection said, and when she smiled Bev saw that there were rips in her mouth, widening it. “All alone?”

“What the fuck,” said Bev, flinging herself back against the wall. “What the fuck. What the fuck.” She knocked her hand on the plaster. “Richie! Bill! Stan! Guys, something is happening this isn’t a j—”

Her reflection snorted. “Calling for your boys again,” it derided. Blood began to seep out of the cuts, until it looked like her mouth was crying. “Of course. Typical. You cling to them, don’t you? How fucking cliche and obvious do you have to be?”

Bev clapped her hands over her ears but it did nothing. She could still hear crystal clear. Her reflection leaned forward, hands braced over the edge of the bottom of the mirror, fingers emerging into the space beyond the mirror like she was going to climb out.

“Oh,” she whined, “poor me, my daddy didn’t love me. Didn’t he discipline you to teach you? To make you strong? Isn’t that what he said, before you betrayed him by running to Uncle Sam? Hmm? Just the first man you ran to. The first of so many. Poor Bill, who you tricked into loving you, whose heart you broke because you’re a pathetic, worthless thing incapable of love!” She spat and the saliva hit Bev’s chin. “Weak! Weak! Manipulative, disgusting, useless except for the one thing anyone with a wound between their legs is good for — ”

_No, _Bev thought, and heard familiar, heavy footsteps on the stairs. She knew their exact sound, their exact echo, their exact _thud._ The rhythm of her father coming up the stairs, the scent of cigarettes, the pounding of his fist on the door, _no _Bev thought again, _no, no — _

Her reflection laughed, but inside Bev’s head, mouth open and gaping and bloody. The red of her hair caught fire and burned, burned, burned. She made no move to put it out. She stood in the fire and let it scald her. 

Bev closed her eyes in her head her reflection’s voice screamed, _LOOK AT ME. _

The fire was gone. There she was: just her, Bev, sitting in a bathroom stall that had _Beverly Marsh is a slut _written in sharpie on it. There was blood dribbling down her leg. Her first period. She remembered. She’d had no one to ask. She hadn’t known what to do. Alone. No girlfriends. No one without a man to make her something, and wasn’t that the truth? Wasn’t that the ugly truth that Bev tried to hide under her bluster, wasn’t that the thing that guaranteed she could never fully love Bill or be fully loved by him, because Bev’s dad had been right. She was weak. She was useless. She was always alone because she didn’t know how to love anybody right.

_Look at us, _cooed the voice of her reflection through the mouth of Bev at twelve, looking at her across time. _Look at who we are, Beverly Marsh. _

-

_Look at who we are, Richard Tozier, _said the Thing and the Thing swirled at him, a whirlwind, impossible to look at completely, impossible to see the outline of, impossible, bursting, a mass that moved like something inside it was trying to climb out.

Richie didn’t know where he was or how or why or when, he’d been in the house but the house was gone, had unfolded around him and become a field, a fairground, a funhouse and in it was Richie and the Thing that followed him, they called to him, that dropped pieces of itself as it walked.

_Trickster makes this world, doesn’t it, Richie? _the Thing asked, but it had no mouth, but the sound came from inside Richie himself: _don’t we tell the world what we are and then become it? Yes yes yes yes we are hungry, aren’t we Richie? Aren’t we always taking what isn’t ours so we can eat it and become it and become it and become it don’t we Richie, don’t we? _

On a pole in the middle of the field was plastered a piece of paper with the name MISSING: RICHARD TOZIER on it, but where the photo ought to have been there was nothing. _Where did we go Richie? _asked the Thing, getting smaller still, smaller all the time as it discarded the things caught up in it, smaller and denser and more frightening as the thing inside pushed to get out, out. _I know where don’t I! Don’t I! _

_HERE,_ Richie screamed back at it, finally. _HERE I AM RIGHT HERE. _

_Where,_ said the Thing, a hiss, a breath, a sigh. 

_DERRY FUCKING MAINE. _

_No Richie no no, _the Thing scolded. It stopped in front of him; only a skin sack now, a skin sack with someone inside kicking and pushing and squirming. _No Richie where are YOU at the center at the center where are YOU Richie? Where and what! And what! AND WHAT! _

The skin burst open and the viscera went everywhere. Richie closed his eyes against it but when he opened them again there was —

Nothing. 

Oh, Richie thought. Oh, he understood, suddenly, terribly.

_All that drama, that flash, Richie Tozier, _giggled the Thing’s voice and it was Richie’s voice. It was Richie. _And at the center, nothing. Nothing to you but the flashbang, Trickster. Why does the trickster make the world except to convince people that he belongs in it? _

-

_BELONG? _bellowed the figure in the fire who was not Beverly, who was no one Ben knew — _BELONG? YOU? THE PITIABLE FAT BOY? _

It was hot, everywhere, and why had Ben run in, why had he gone inside without his gear, why had he not given his phone to Georgie, why had he — why, just because a pretty girl thought he looked handsome once? Just because she had been kind to him — 

_But kindness is all you have, _said the figure, burning, getting always closer, looming, growing, burgeoning, bloating, like a whale carcass left to rot. _Isn’t it, Benny boy? Leeching off their kindness that you take for friendship? _

_They love me, _Ben thought, pitifully, unable to close his eyes. Unable not to look at how the creature bubbled and melted in the fire even as it grew. 

It laughed. _Do they, Ben? Isn’t this why you became a hero by trade, Benjamin Hanscom? To force them to love you through debt? _

_Eddie and Mike don’t owe — _

_Ahhhh, _said the creature, so large now it took up the whole room, hunched against the ceiling, against the walls, Ben himself: _but do they love you or pity you? Do they love you or have you made them require you? _

Ben’s stomach fell out. He stared up at the bubbled, bloated monstrosity of his own face leering down at him. There was cruelty and pity in its — in his voice. There he was: a boy on fire. The quiet, boring, fat boy who took up considerably more space than he deserved. The hero because he was selfish, because heroics demanded value. Demanded space. Demanded love. Didn’t Ben only save people so that they would love him? 

So that they would_ need _him, and keep him in their needing?

Hadn’t he chosen fire because Mike’s parents had died in a fire, and now he knew that he never would, so long as he kept Ben?

Above him, his own enormous face burned, burned, burned, burned, burned. With a blistered mouth it said, _what are we, Benjamin, if not a glutton for things we haven’t earned? _

-

_You think it is enough? _bellowed the mangled corpse, on a lone hospital bed in the house, face bandages and body covered in casts. _You think you can earn your worth by coming AFTER THE FACT? _

Bill stayed frozen in the doorway. The body was so small. It had no arms. Blood was seeping through the bandages, soaking the mattress. The body twitched at him, like it was reaching. He knew that shape. He knew that twitch. He had seen it the first days after they found Georgie, before he’d gotten used to not having an arm. But it couldn’t be Georgie. Georgie was fine. He was outside. Bill had — Bill knew. He _knew. _He —

_But leaving is what we DO, isn’t it, Bill? _asked the body, bleeding too from its mouth. From everywhere. Hemorrhaging. Bill didn’t know how to stop it, what to do. _Selfish Bill Denbrough, so eager to do exactly what he wants! So demanding of those around him so he can have his life to his exacting specifications! _

He shook his head. No. He was just going crazy. That’s all. That’s all this was, a madness, an insanity. Bill would blink soon and they’d all be there, the other Losers, his friends who loved him —

_Love? LOVE? Love is PATIENT love is KIND it does not ENVY — _

_Yes! Yes! That! _

_Are they patient with you? Or are they submissive? Do they work tirelessly to make you love them, poor things, poor idiots, poor suckers too blind to know that you don’t love them, that you hold yourself so high above them, that you are not kind, that you envy them all for the very things they think you want them to change! _

Bill couldn’t breathe. There they were, his own thoughts, but in Georgie’s voice, in this bloody, consumed body: made small maybe from Bill’s own teeth, the teeth of his wanting and his selfishness. Yes, they all wanted to please him, didn’t he know this? Didn’t he complain about being made a leader but then never relinquish the role? 

Didn’t he envy Richie’s spontaneity, Bev’s brash, Stan’s loyalty, Stan’s love, Stan’s kindness and his — 

_Love always protects, _cooed the body, drawing Bill into it. He couldn’t stop. He was reaching his hands out. He had to see. He had to see who it was. _Love always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. And you, Bill? Don’t you doubt? Don’t you give up? Didn’t you give up on your family, on Beverly, on your career? Didn’t you abandon everything because all you are is what love is not? _

_Georgie, _Bill thought.

_You didn’t believe him because you always know best, don’t you, Bill? And now here I am, _said the body, as its face poked out from the bandages as it came unveiled. _Look yourself in the eyes, Bill Denbrough, _his own mangled body said.

-

_Why can’t you meet my eyes, Stanley Uris? _asked the body in the bathtub. Stan couldn’t stop staring with horror at its wrists, open and gaping, the gashes speaking like mouths. They spat blood on the consonants. _Is it because you’re t o o s c a r e d? _

Stan said nothing.

_Stan always says nothing,_ jeered the cuts. _That’s what Stan does best. _

Stan found himself suddenly with a roll of paper towels in his hand, on his knees trying fruitlessly to mop up the blood, but not brave enough to get close and staunch the bleeding. Too afraid to look at the eyes. Too afraid to be within grabbing distance. 

_That’s right, clean the mess, don’t fix the problem, _jeered the wrists. _Too scared of solutions! Too scared of even just a tiny little risk! _

_I TOOK RISKS, _Stan shouted in his head, still cleaning the floor, still not looking up.

**_RICHIE_ **_TOOK RISKS, _yelled the wrists, so loudly that blood spattered into the top of Stan’s head. He could feel it, somehow, soaking into his yarmulke as if it were soaking into his brain. _YOU FOLLOWED ALONG BEHIND! _

It was true that moving to LA had been dicier for Richie, whose parents hadn’t been able to help him much; Stan wasn’t on their lease, his mom was, and she’d been their guarantor. Richie had eaten a lot more ramen than Stan had needed to, but he’d — but it’s not like he would have let Richie starve at the end of the day, not like he’d ever have kicked him out —

_How charitable, _the cuts sneered. Stan recognized the voice. He looked down at his own wrists and was not surprised to see that gashes had opened, that they were speaking to him with his own voice, that the blood on his hands was his own. 

He stared at them. The paper towels in his hand were useless. He could slow the bleeding but he — but there was some relief in not doing it, in knowing this would be over soon, whatever this was, that the fear and the anxiety and the latent and untreated OCD were ending, that he could just lay _down. _

_Of course, _said his wrists. _Who loves giving up more than a coward? And who is a bigger coward than us? _

-

“What the fuck!” Mike shouted, leaping from his desk and running outside to the car. Georgie was scrambling out, face white, pupils huge. His whole, tiny frame shook. Mike patter him down frantically for breaks but found none.

Georgie was shouting at him: “MIKE THE HOUSE PENNYWISE AND BEN WENT IN TOO,” which made no sense at all.

“Georgie. George. Calm down. Tell me what happened. Where is Bill? Why on earth are you _driving _— ”

“They _went _into the _house!_” Georgie yelled, voice right. “And they didn’t let me go in with them and then Ben came and then suddenly I saw Pennywise and Ben, he, I don’t know why but it was like he saw something inside, he ran in, he told me to stay in the car and not breathe in the smoke but there wasn’t any smoke, I don’t know! I think Pennywise tricked him, there was so much screaming, we have to go, we have to save them!”

Mike didn’t think: he yanked Georgie out of the driver’s seat and got into it himself. He silenced Georgie’s protests with a look, and pointed into the library. Furious, Georgie went in.

Mike peeled out of the driveway. He knew the back roads well enough that he didn’t hesitate once he got out of downtown to shoot off a text to Eddie: _going 2 neibolt danger ben. _

He didn’t check for a response, just drove. He threw Bill’s car into park next to Ben’s and ran up the steps. It was just a house. It didn’t matter what you believed; at the end of the day, it was just a house, and his friend was inside.

“Mike,” said a voice, and Mike whirled around with his hands in fists. “Okay, Rambo, calm down,” Eddie told him.

Mike gaped at him. “How the fuck did you get here so fast? Wait — did you ride your _bike?_”

“It’s eco-friendly,” Eddie snapped. “And I didn’t get here that fast. I was already here.”

“What?”

“I was doing some research this morning. Just to—whatever. And I found something that I thought... well, I didn’t want them to go in without knowing.”

Something softened in Mike’s dumb chest. “Aw, Ed.”

“Shut up,” Eddie snapped. He reached down and picked up a handful of rocks, dropping them into his fanny pack. “Let’s just get this over with. Put this on.” From a side pocket in the pack he produced a medical mask. Mike raised his eyebrows but put it on obediently, and together they went inside. 

The inside looked much like it had the first time Mike had been there: like someone had pulled a Tim Burton set to life. He felt Eddie curl one of his hands around the back of his shirt as they crept down the front hallway. At the end of it was a door, closed tight. They paused in front.

“If I get fucking murdered in this house I swear to God,” Eddie murmured, and then in a fit of bravery reached around Mike and shoved the door open.

The _Get In _crew were... lying in a heap. Just lying there, like a bunch of puppets whose strings had all been cut at the same time.

“Uh,” said Mike.

Eddie darted around him. Richie had fallen at a bad angle, and was twitching. Eddie delicately adjusted his head. “Open a window,” he commanded, not looking up. “And help me get the masks on them.”

Mike obeyed; he always obeyed Eddie when Eddie got bossy. They covered all four of them and jimmied open one of the windows. The other wouldn’t budge, so Mike kicked it until it shattered and fresh air rushed in, sweeping out the musk. 

“But where is Ben?” Eddie asked, frowning. 

“There was a set of stairs by the doorway. Maybe he went down.”

“I’ll go,” Eddie said. “You start dragging them out. They need fresh air.” He stood, then seemed to notice the camera strapped to Richie’s chest. He knelt, turned it round and said into the lens: “Hey dumb-fucking-asses, look who was right and who’s the asshole.” Then he got back to his feet and jogged out of the room, back to the foyer. “IF I MEET A FUCKING LEPER,” he called over his shoulder, “I’M FORCIBLY MAKING OUT WITH EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU.”

Mike shook his head, huffing half a laugh. His heart was still beating in his chest, but — it was almost reassuring, in its own way, to find them like this. Something had happened but nobody was dead, and there certainly weren’t any ghosts.

He started with Bev, who was easy enough to lift. He had her out on the porch and was dragging Richie and Stan by one foot each when Eddie shouted downstairs: “MIKE.”

“WHAT?”

“_MIKE._”

He dropped Richie and Stan unceremoniously by the door, next to Bev, and went to the top of the basement stairs. “_WHAT?_”

“COME THE FUCK DOWN HERE, THAT’S WHAT.”

Mike jogged back to the room and hauled Stan out into the sunlight, then followed Eddie’s demands and went down into the basement. He found Eddie standing over Ben, who also has a mask on. Beside Ben was a hole in the floor, a dark nothing inside, and around it written in red paint was _come and play. down here we all float. _

Mike felt shivers whip up his back, looking at it. “Down here we all float,” he read.

“Isn’t that what Bowers said to you?” Eddie asked, voice hushed. “When we — with Georgie?”

Mike nodded. His hands tightened into fists at his sides, almost involuntarily. The air felt thick and hard to breathe. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said flatly, and hooked his arms under Ben’s armpits. Eddie dutifully picked up his ankles and together they managed to drag him up the stairs, Mike staring hard at the words around the hole behind Eddie. What did it mean? Had Bowers written it, or read it while he was living here? 

Down where? What did it mean, _float?_

When they got outside, the _Get In _crew was stirring. Richie had Bev’s head on his lap, and Bill had managed to crawl over to Stanley, resting on hand on the back of his neck. All four of them were visibly pale. They’d left the masks on.

Eddie dropped Ben’s feet with a thud; Mike set his torso down more gently. Without pausing for breath, Eddie pointed a finger at Richie and shouted, “I _told you,_ motherfucker!” 

Richie made a whining sound. “Don’t shout at me, my head hurts,” he muttered. “Have mercy.”

“I’ll show you mercy,” Eddie grumbled, but his expression softened as he went over and crouched over Bev and Richie. He gently tugged the mask off Richie’s face, running his thumb along his bottom lip before turning his face side to side, looking for for wounds. “Are you okay?” he asked. 

Mike blinked. It wasn’t a voice he’d heard from Eddie before — the Eddie that Mike knew showed love with studied disinterest, sincere but careful. This Eddie was different. Mike pushed at the spike of odd jealousy, that Richie could show up for two days and bring it out of him when Mike and Ben have been trying for their whole lives.

“I’m okay,” Richie said. “Nothing — happened.”

“Fuck _you,_ nothing happened,” Eddie snapped, letting go of his face to shove at his chest. “Mike and I saved your _asses _is what happened.”

“Saved our asses from what? A nap?”

“A _nap? _You’re calling that a fucking group cuddle pile, you absolute psychopath?!”

“The cameras,” croaked Stan, finally looking up. There were dark circles under his eyes. “Are they still on? Did they — did they record —?”

All four stiffened, suddenly not looking at one another. Something _had _happened, Mike thought. Something they desperately wanted, or didn’t want, proof of; he didn’t know which. He knelt by Ben and gently shook him until he began to stir. 

“They’re still on,” Eddie was saying blithely. “Look, we can watch it when we get back to Mike’s. But I came because I wanted to tell you something.”

“What?” asked Bill, politely, like Eddie was being humored.

Eddie shot him a look that said he’d caught the tone. “I figured out what the fuck is wrong with that house,” he said, and that’s when Ben woke.

-

Nobody spoke in the car. Not a single one of them would survive a vibe check right now, Richie thought, which was embarrassing because Richie considered his vibes to be fucking unimpeachable, usually. 

Bev hadn’t let go of him since they’d woken, and nobody could look at anybody else. They made it back to Mike’s and sat silently in the living room drinking tea that Mike made, probably just to keep his hands busy, while Bill took his car to go get Georgie from the library. None of them had moved by the time they got back. Georgie had taken one look and then all and announced triumphantly, “I _told _you! _Now _do you believe me?”

Eddie’s theory was that Ben had been right all along: MG&E had polluted the environment, but it wasn’t the water. It was the air. Thallium particles from the pipes. They caused hallucinations, illness, psychosis. It explained everything, Richie guessed. It was certainly compelling. 

Bev shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. They’d set the camera up on one of Mike’s drawer sets and were sitting in a circle. “It felt — what I saw... I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of drugs and this didn’t feel anything like that.”

“What kind of drugs?” Georgie asked, peering closer at her. “Like weed and stuff?”

Richie snorted. “King George, if you ever hallucinate like that after smoking weed then someone has definitely sold you some real garbage and you’re gonna need a new dealer,” he said, because Richie believed in the power of mentorship.

“Shut the fuck _up,_ Rich,” Bill had snapped. “Georgie isn’t going to smoke weed.”

“I mean not right _now,_” Richie conceded. “All I’m saying is when the time comes and he needs a guru, KG knows who’s cool and who’s a narc.”

Georgie beamed. Stan reached out to shove Richie over sideways, toppling him into Bev’s lap. 

“What did you see?” Eddie asked, curious, and Bev flinched. Richie punched his shoulder.

“Don’t be rude, fuckface,” he hissed. What kind of nosy bastard asked a lady questions like that, here, in polite company? Well. It was company, anyway. _Richie _was certainly polite but he couldn’t speak for Stan. Stan was a real raunchy son-of-a-bitch sometimes. “A girl’s hallucinations are between her and the evil spirit that prompted them.”

“It’s not an evil spirit,” Eddie said evenly. “It’s air pollution.”

“Just yesterday you were telling Ben that he was a crazy conspiracy theorist.”

“Well, yesterday we were operating off the idea that the water was polluted, which was a dumb conspiracy theory. Mine’s a good one, that makes sense.”

“Fuck off,” said Ben. He had his arm covering his face and was leaning heavily into Mike’s side. 

Eddie flicked him off. “What, you’re on team _ghost clown _now? _You?_ Mr. Government Conspiracy?”

Ben shrugged, not removing his hand. “When I was inside, I... Eddie, I didn’t go down to the basement. I went _up. _To the second floor.”

Richie felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“Then how did you get to the basement?” Eddie demanded.

Ben finally removed his hand, rolling his head to give Eddie and excruciatingly dry look. “I don’t _know,_ Edward. A fucking ghost clown, maybe?”

Richie made a face, because despite his better instincts he thought Ben had a good point. He could see falling _down _one set of stairs maybe, but falling _up _two?

Something cold clenched in this stomach, which Richie absolutely refused to investigate. His plan was to pretend the entire thing had — well, not that it hadn’t happened; clearly it had. Clearly he’d passed out for an unspecified amount of time, and he loved the idea that it happened because some weird stuff did science to him. He did _not _love the idea that a real ghost clown made him, like, peer into the heart of the universe or whatever, because if a clown did it, if... well, if it was a hallucination, then it was just a hallucination, right?

There was nothing _to _a hallucination, it was just your brain going through brain things. Richie already knew that somewhere deep inside the parts of himself that he repressed with all the force of one of those machines who crushed cars in a junkyard that he believed himself to be basically a nothing. Just kind of a flashy outer shell with an empty middle, like the worst kind of Easter egg chocolate that was just a fancy mold that broke the second you bit into it and didn’t even have a surprise toy inside.

Like what the fuck was _up _with those? They were against the Geneva Convention, in Richie’s opinion.

So if it was a hallucination, that was fine, wasn’t it? It was just Richie’s brain reminding him of his own... whatever.

Richie looked at the camera and said: “Listen Losers, you know I feel strongly that evidence must be irrefutable, but I gotta say. This feels pretty fuckin’ spooky. Spooktacular, one might say.” 

“Okay, can we all just like, please stop saying fuck,” Bill implored, looking tired. “Gee, don’t tell Mom and Dad. And definitely don’t tell them about Bev doing drugs.”

“Did you guys do drugs too?” Georgie asked, cocking his head to the side.

“No,” said Bill, at the exact same time that Richie said, “Abso-fricking-_ lute _ly, babe.”

Bill considered him for a long moment, then said, “Well. Thank you for not swearing.”

Richie threw him a salute. Eddie nudged into his side, clearly annoyed to have lost Richie’s attention. “Well then, what did _you _see?” he asked grouchily.

Almost without thinking about it, Richie reaches out to prod at him, toying with his shirt and idly fussing with the zipper on his fanny pack. Eddie seemed to settle under the attention. 

“Nothing,” Richie said, honestly enough. “It wanted to scare me, so it showed me absolutely nothing.”

-

Stan watched Richie’s hands. He watched Eddie pitch toward him. He watched the nervous way that Richie put his mask on, grinning crookedly. 

_Richie took risks, _he thought, remembering.

He looked over at Bill, who’s eyes were dark, his shoulders hunched. Georgie was tucked under his arm beside him.

Stan wanted to believe it was thallium. Eddie was right that it could produce psychosis. He was right that it could be in the air. It was good, such a tidy solution, so easy to grip onto and push out the other possibility, which was that there was a spirit and it knew Stan’s — it knew Stan.

The lights flickered a little, and Stan looked over at the camera, still recording. They were a joke show. They weren’t real ghost hunters. They barely even made money. They could go home and forget about it, because they were actually just a bunch of assholes, not fucking.... Ghostbusters.

“—fferent forms,” Georgie was saying, when Stan zoned back i to the conversation. “He was a clown with me, but — but I think he was something else for Henry Bowers, because he kept calling him some other name. He was... I don’t know. Pennywise kept scaring him, and — and me, too, he wanted us both to be afraid and that’s why Henry — I don’t think he _wanted _to,” Georgie swallowed, but then went on determinedly, “to hurt me. But he was confused. He’d been with Pennywise a long time and I think he just went crazy.” He shrugged, letting Bill pull him in tighter, as if he could mend the wound of the past if only he could hold his brother close enough.

That was Bill for you.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Bill said.

Georgie flares up at him. “Yes I _do, _” he argued. “Because you didn’t listen to me before and you went in and — and something almost happened! And Mike can’t always save us both!” 

Mike startled. “You knew?” he asked, sounding surprised.

Georgie rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest, looking extremely put out with all of them. “_ Yeah,_ I’m not _stupid._ I was _there,_ ding dong.”

Richie clutched his chest. “Wow, okay, so Georgie can absolutely murder Mike right in front of us with such filth as ‘ding dong’ but

I can’t say fuck? Double standards.”

Everyone ignored him except Eddie, who kicked him a little, but gently, almost like it was a laugh. Richie caught his foot and held onto it. 

“I didn’t think you remembered,” Mike said.

“Well, I did,” Georgie told him.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Nobody wanted to talk about it! You all thought I was crazy!”

Bill looked pained. “We didn’t think you were crazy, Gee.”

“You thought he was my imaginary friend. You said so.”

Bev leaned forward, putting her hand on Georgie’s leg and giving it a gentle squeeze. “We didn’t think you were crazy,” she assured him, voice gentle. “We thought that you had been through something terrible, and that it was hard to talk about, so you were talking about it in a way that felt easier.”

Georgie frowned. “Well, I wasn’t,” he said.

“I know. I believe you,” Bev answered, and Stan’s head snapped to look at her. Her expression was honest: she wasn’t lying. Bev did believe Georgie. Bev thought it was a ghost.

He felt his hand starting to shake, so he tucked them into his lap. His wrists were clean. No gashes. No wounds. 

Ben said, “I believe you too, Georgie.” 

Something seemed to snap in Georgie then; his eyes got wide and wet and Stan thought, _god, he’s so young, _and he was. Young and brave, brave this whole time, trying to tell them and tell them and tell them.

“I believe you, KG,” Richie muttered, reaching out to ruffle Georgie’s hair. 

“Me too,” Mike rumbled. He looked at Georgie very seriously. “I believe you.”

They all turned to look at Bill, who was glaring up at the ceiling. Georgie held himself perfectly still. 

Stan felt his hands wrap around his own wrists. He didn’t know what he wanted Bill to say. No — he knew. He wanted Bill to tell them they were crazy. He wanted Bill to tell him he was okay, he was safe, he wasn’t any of the things his brain had told him he was, because Stan would believe it, but only if it was Bill who told him.

Bill dropped his gaze back down. He looked at Stan, and for a moment they just looked at each other. It took a moment for Stan to realize that they were all waiting for Bill to tell them what the final word would be, but Bill was waiting for Stan.

_Richie took risks, _Stan thought. It was true. Stan has let Richie be brave, had ridden the coattails of his bravery.

He felt a rush of something strange, and almost giddy: he had seen it. He had seen the absolute worst thing, hadn’t he, the absolute lowest and most hideous thing about him ripped out into the open, bleeding out. And yet here he was, still; here still were all his friends; here still was Bill, looking to him. He believed, Stan knew. He wanted permission to pretend he didn’t. He wanted Stan to tell him he could walk away, but he couldn’t walk away, and they both knew it, so what he really wanted was for Stan to force him to be himself. For Stan to remind Bill that leadership wasn’t something you took, or something that was offered to you; it was something you just were.

Stan could be brave. He hadn’t ever been before, but Bill was asking him to be, and he could start now. Bill would drive, and Stan could sit in the passenger seat giving him directions. 

Richie could ride bitch.

He reached out and took Bill’s hand. Without looking away, he said, “I believe you, Georgie,” and Bill closed his eyes for a moment before squeezing Stan’s hand.

When he opened his eyes, Bill looked down at where Georgie was staring up at him, holding his breath. He smiled a little. “I believe you, Gee. I’m sorry I didn’t before.”

Georgie deflated against him, arms coming up around his middle. 

Eddie sighed. “Look, sorry. I know this is like, a moment or whatever, but I still think it’s thallium.” 

“So it wanted us scared,” Ben mused, ignoring him pointedly. “That must have been why it was a clown for Georgie.”

Georgie made a face. “I’m not _scared,_ I just don’t _like _them,” he muttered.

_In for a penny, _Stan thought, still feeling buzzy, like something had broken but in a good way, and confessed: “It was a body, for me. My own. It was — me, with my wrists cut. It told me that I was a coward.”

Everyone looked at him, but Stan didn’t look up from where his hand was still holding Bill’s, and he was only a little surprised to see Richie’s hand suddenly appear on top of them, then Bev, then Georgie, and Ben, and Mike, and even Eddie, who thought it was thallium.

Stan looked up.

Ben said bracingly, “I saw a fire. But it was me in the fire, and I was there because I — because I wanted to be a hero so that people would love me. So that they would have to.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Richie muttered. When Stan looked over at him, his neck was flushed. He glared up at the ceiling for a moment and then said, “Fine. Whatever. I saw myself, too, except I was this like, horrible exploding bag of flesh, but. After it exploded, there was nothing there. It was hollow. Just a lot of noise. Just like me, I guess.” He pulled his hands free and did jazz hands.

“It wanted to scare you,” Stan murmured, “so it showed you nothing.”

Richie gave an exaggerated shrug of his shoulder. “Yeah, well. Whatever. Now you know.”

“Bitch, we _been _knew,” Bev said. “You think we didn’t know?”

Stan snorted. “You’re not mysterious, Richie,” he said, joking because if they were tender with Richie now he’d only retreat.

“Fuck you, I’m very mysterious!” Richie cried. “Eddie, tell them I’m mysterious. That’s why you’re attracted to me.”

“I’m not attracted to you,” said Eddie without inflection.

“Then why are you holding my hand?” Richie demanded, and Eddie shrugged. 

“I like holding hands,” he said, and grinned.

Bev rolled her eyes. She’d disentangled herself from Stan too, and with her went all the rest of them, except Bill, who tangled their fingers and refused to look at him.

_You big dummy, _Stan thought fondly. 

“It showed me my first period,” Bev told them, looking very pleased when six boys recoiled. Eddie looked unphased. “But. I mean. Really what it showed me was that I’m only friends with boys, which is kind of fucked up and probably has to do with the fact that my dad was... well. _You _know.” She looked at Mike, who met her eyes with calm grace and nodded. “It told me I was manipulating you all with my feminine wiles.”

Bill wrenched his eyes from Stan to blink at her. “Your... what,” he repeated.

“Her _feminine wiles,_ Billiam, keep up,” Richie said cheerfully. “Her hoo-ha. Her vagoo. Her Georgia O’Keefe. Her — ”

“What’s a vagoo?” Georgie asked, and Bill went very pale.

“It’s a type of beaver dam,” Richie said without missing a beat. 

“Cool,” said Georgie, and Bill fell forward so far his nose almost touched the floor. It seemed very clear to Stan that he wanted to be dead, which Stan sympathized with. He ran his thumb along the edge of Bill’s hand, comfortingly. Bill gave him a squeeze. 

There was a long quiet, and Stan nudged Bill with his knee. “Well?” he asked gently. “What did you see?”

Bill sat up and looked at Georgie, agonized, but admitted anyway: “I saw me, too. I saw me in a hospital bed, and it told me I was too demanding, and that I didn’t... that I couldn’t love people right.” His voice broke on the word _love._

“There’s no right way to love people,” Mike said quietly. They all turned to look at him. He shrugged. “There isn’t one way you’re supposed to do it. You just love them, that’s all.”

Bill smiled at him, slow and big, and Mike smiled back.

“You are a demanding bastard, though,” Richie said, and Stan, groaning, chucked a pillow at him.

-

They decided to go back.

Of course they did.

Eddie stood in the bathroom knocking his head against the mirror. He hated his friends. He hated the _Get In _crew. He even kind of lowkey hated Georgie Denbrough, which he recognized wasn’t fair. 

Ben had started it, Ben with his big dumb heart, Ben looking at the group and saying queitly, “Look, whether it’s thallium or a ghost clown, if we don’t do something, people are going to die. This is my home. You take care of your home, because of the people in it.”

“It hurt Georgie,” Bill had agreed. “I’m not — if there’s even a chance, that it could hurt Georgie again. I’m not risking it.”

“Well you’re not gonna go the fuck _alone,_” Bev had said flatly. “We’re all going with you. The _Get In _crew don’t split up. We always said.”

Richie had groaned, loud and long. “_ Fuuuuck._ We did always say that. It’s the number one rule of horror films.” 

When Eddie emerged from battering his brain against the bathroom mirror, Richie was sitting on their bed, legs folded underneath him. They had decided to go back in the morning, because Georgie had to go back to his parents’ house and nobody felt like tempting fate in the dark. Ben was running out to pick up the Chinese food they’d ordered, and Mike was rummaging around in the basement for good wine from his grandfather’s collection in case they all, like, fucking _died. _

Richie tilted his head curiously. “Why’d you come today?” he asked. “You said you wouldn’t.”

Eddie ripped his button-up off, annoyed that he felt self-conscious, annoyed that Richie wasn’t even pretending not to watch him. He yanked a t-shirt down over his head. “Because,” he snapped, “someone had to go get you out.”

“Me?”

“All of you. Mostly Ben.”

“Ah.”

Eddie sighed. “Look, it’s — ” He scrubbed at his forehead. “I got stuck in there, and Ben — they came for me. Ben and Mike. So I had to go for them, you see?”

“And that’s why you’re coming tomorrow? To make sure they get out?”

Eddie chewed his lip. He really... he really _did _think it was thallium particles, actually. It explained everything, and even though he knew that Aunt Miriam was definitely haunting her portrait there was a difference between Aunt Miriam The Pervert and a cannibalistic ghost clown that wanted to turn their whole town crazy. But even still: there was something fucked up about that house, and if Eddie had his way he’d never go back to it, ever.

But the thing was: Eddie had been taught to love first by a woman who didn’t know how to do it, but taught second by two boys who did, right? And they’d taught him that love was going into places you were scared of to make sure that the other people in that place were okay. 

Love was letting people do what they felt they had to, and be who they thought they were, and picking up the pieces after. 

“I’m going because they’re my friends,” Eddie said simply, approaching the foot of the bed, “and they need me to go.”

They looked at each other for a long minute, and then Richie said, “_ Jesus _that is — _so hot. _”

Eddie blinked. “Uh,” he said. “What?”

But Richie was already reaching forward and yanking him in by his t-shirt, drawing him close. “So small,” he was saying, “so loyal, so ready to fight. I’ll bet you used to get into scraps in the school yard and Mike and Ben would have to throw you over their shoulders to drag you away.”

Their noses knocked together. Eddie was tempted to hold his breath and also tempted to sock Richie in the jaw, because he was stretched out Eddie’s favorite t-shirt with his dumb hands. 

“They didn’t _throw me over their shoulders,_” Eddie hissed. “I mean — it was _one time,_ and I — ”

Richie cut him off by drawing him in close enough that Eddie went cross-eyed trying to look at him. “Listen,” he said, somewhat urgently. “Listen. We might die tomorrow. I mean, we might literally die. How many times do you get the chance to — I mean how often can you really say honestly _baby, this could be our last night on earth?_”

Eddie could taste the words on his lips; they tasted like the tea he’d been drinking. Soon they’d taste like wine and Chinese food. “You want to fuck me because it’s our last night on earth?” he asked, for clarification.

Richie nodded, then shook his head, then nodded again. “I want to fuck you for a whole host of reasons,” he admitted, honestly enough, “but I was gonna take longer to work up to it. I didn’t realize there was going to be this whole dramatic _deadline. _”

Eddie pulled back a little. Richie was looking at him with what seemed like very little guile: big eyes, hand clutching his shirt but still trembling, a little. “You’re going back to LA,” Eddie pointed out. “There was always going to be a deadline.”

Richie pursed his lips and darted his gaze away. “Well,” he said, somewhat defensively, “maybe. But you never know. People make long distance work all the time.”

“You don’t even know me,” Eddie said, leaning back in anyway. He was whispering, for some reason.

“Yes I do,” Richie answered. He was also whispering. Why were either of them whispering? Everyone else was downstairs. “Eddie. I know you. I don’t know — how I know you. But I know you. I... ” 

He was right, Eddie thought. Wasn’t that the stupidest fucking thing?

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Eddie heard himself say, horribly. “I waited all this fucking time. It’s why I stayed in this stupid town. Where the fuck have you been?”

Richie shook his head, helpless. “Nowhere,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here now.”

They stood in silence for a minute, faces so close that Eddie couldn’t get a hold of Richie’s expression and didn’t want to try. Everything felt like it was happening so fast, but also, somehow, like it had been building forever. Like Eddie had known Richie all this long while and they’d only just woken up to — whatever it was that sparked between them. It felt like Richie was part of the fabric of him, the way Ben and Mike were, even though he’d only been here, Christ, less than a week.

“This is so fucking stupid,” Eddie announced. 

“Yeah,” Richie agreed, and then kissed him. He tugged Eddie in closer, impossibly, and Eddie had the fleeting thought that the best way to protect his favorite shirt from getting stretched out was just to take it off, so he climbed onto the bed and Richie’s lap and that’s exactly what he did.

-

“They’re fucking for _sure,_” Bev said, before taking a long swig of wine. She watched Stan help Mike transfer the takeout from its boxes into bowls, which seemed like a lot of effort for no real purpose, but it was Mike’s house, and if he wanted to be a fancy bitch that was his prerogative. 

Ben hummed mildly beside her. He’d changed into his pajamas and he looked so cozy that Bev wanted to crawl into his lap and go to sleep. “Probably,” he agreed. “I hope your friend Richie is a gentleman because Eddie doesn’t have a single friend who’s good at heartbreak.”

Bev snorted. “I am reasonably confident that’s the first time _Richie _and _gentleman _have been used in the same sentence,” she mused. “But. For all his bluster, he’s actually just a big soft baby. I think he likes Eddie. I think he wants to like. Give him his class ring and his letterman jacket.”

“As fucking if Richie played sports,” Stan said from the other side of the kitchen. “Beverly. Please.”

“Stan ran track,” Bev confided cheerfully. “He was good. He was the _captain. _”

“I don’t know why I ever let you move in with us,” Stan told her flatly. “It was definitely top three worst decisions of the decade for me.”

Bev beamed. “Imagine him in those little booty shorts. The running ones. Lycra.”

Before anyone could comment, Stan said quickly: “Anyway, they’re not fucking. They’re _making love. _”

“They just met,” Mike pointed out dryly. “They’re making lust at best.”

“They’re forging better midwest-northeast relations,” Ben added. “Doing their part to unite the country in this time of political polarization and strife.”

Everyone laughed, and the front door swung open to reveal Bill, a little wet from the rain. He grinned at them all, shaking the water out of his hair. Stan watched him run a thumb along his chin to collect some of the drips, Bev noticed.

Stan watched him the whole time, actually. She noticed that, too.

(She’d always noticed.)

“Georgie is home safe,” Bill announced, then registered the number of people in the kitchen and asked, “Where are Richie and Eddie?”

“Guess,” said Bev dryly. 

Bill frowned. “Uh. Changing into pajamas?”

“They certainly are getting out of their day clothes,” Stan said.

It took a minute for it to register; when it did, Bill pulled a face. “Yeugh,” he said. “Gross.”

Beside her, Ben stiffened. “What’s gross about it?” he asked, pulling back his shoulders. “Do you have a problem with — ”

“_ No,_” Bill interrupted quickly, looking horrified. “No! That’s — fine. I mean, it’s great. I love gay sex, actually!” Bev felt her own eyes widen, and Stan’s jaw nearly hit the floor. Bill flushed a dark red. “N-n-no — I mean — I d-don’t mean that I — I haven’t, ever, myself. Not that I w-w-wwwouldn’t? I mean. Er, I haven’t, but not because — I just m-meant. I love it for... other... people...” He trailed off, hand coming up to the back of his flushed neck. “Okay. All of that c-c-c-ame out really fucked up. It’s gross because it’s Richie. That’s all.”

Mike had turned away to look very hard into the sink. Bev could see his shoulders shaking. Ben was covering his mouth with his hand.

Stan was staring at Bill like he’d grown a new head. “Sorry,” Bev said, because she knew Stan wouldn’t, “but just to clarify did you just — _come out as bisexual?_”

Bill looked startled. “What?” he asked. “No. I — no.” He glanced at Stan, and then quickly away. “I mean. I don’t think so. What? No. I haven’t ever — that’s not how it works, you don’t just get to — suddenly decide to — that’s not how it works.”

“It’s kind of how it works,” Bev told him gently. “You don’t have to have already sucked a dick to want to suck a dick.”

_Oh my God, _she thought.

“Oh my God,” Bill said, and then, a little desperately, “What did we order?”

“Chinese,” said Stan quickly. Stan’s neck was also red. Bev wasn’t sure she’d ever been happier, ever, in her life. “And, uh, Mike found some wine. It’s really fancy and old. Because of how we might die.”

“Great!” Bill cried, clapping his hands. “Well, let’s get through it before Richie finishes upstairs and demands to have some.”

Bev and Ben shared a look and, without thinking much of it, she reached out and took his hand. 

-

In the morning, they drove back to the Neibolt. Bill’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel the whole time, and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop. His heart felt like it was going to force its way out of his chest at any minute. He wanted to throw up, and he wanted to crash the car so that they couldn’t go. He wanted to drive the other direction.He wanted to be anywhere except where he was. 

Beside him, Stan said in a gentle voice, “Turn left here.”

Bill turned left. 

In the backseat, Georgie cleared his throat. He’d demanded to be allowed to come, and even though Bill hadn’t wanted to let him, he also recognized that Georgie had a bicycle and would have shown up anyway. So they’d compromised and agreed he could come but would stay with the car with a cell phone, in case they needed backup. 

“I think I should come in,” he said, for the umpteenth time.

“I know you do,” Bill told him. “Your request is noted and denied.”

“But — ”

“Georgie. There’s a murderous clown in there, and it knows you. I’m not letting you near it.”

Georgie subsided, but a glance in the rearview showed off how bitter he was about it. That was fine. Bill would rather he was mad at him now than, like, dead later. 

“KG, we need you to be alive and sane so that when we utterly fail you can save our asses,” Richie said cheerfully. 

Richie had been very cheerful all last night and all morning, probably because Richie had gotten laid. He and Eddie had come downstairs without even bothering to pretend they’d been up to anything other than sex, hair akimbo and hands all over each other. Richie hadn’t been able to do anything but beam at them all night, apparently unconcerned that they were all going to die in the morning.

Georgie rolled his eyes. “You’re not going to fail,” he said, as if that was a stupid thing to even pretend. “You’re the best ghost hunters in the business. You’ve got _Bill. _”

“Technically Bill’s just a cameraman,” Richie pointed out, unhelpfully.

Stan turned around so he could look at them. “Hey, Richie?”

“Yeah bud?”

“Shut the f...rick up.” 

“Wow, okay. This is the thanks I get for being the only friend who went to your bar mitzvah.”

“I explicitly told you not to come!”

“Yeah, but you gave me the date and time so you didn’t _mean _it.”

Stan looked into the camera on Bev’s lap. “Viewers, I did mean it, and I think we all know he knew that.”

There’s a weird energy in the car, all of them punchy and playing it up for the camera. Bill doesn’t know that he’s ever felt this _anxious _before a shoot; he’s not sure, suddenly, that he ever really believed in ghosts, actually, before this. It was always assumed that they wouldn’t find anything.

Now he’s pretty sure they’re going to.

It strikes him, suddenly, that if they get all of this on film they could actually, concretely change the world in some way.

What if their joke show proves the existence of an afterlife?

What if they joke show starts a _new religion? _

“Just drive,” Stan advises him quietly. Bill can feel his smile, which is weird. “Stop doing that thing.”

“What thing?”

“That thing with your brain.”

“What, thinking?”

“Yeah. Cut that shit out.”

Bill laughed. He took one hand off the wheel, feeling a spark of bravery, hearing Mike in his head say _there’s no wrong way to love people; you just love them, that’s all. _Hearing Bev say — say — well, what she said. Bev, who knew him and had loved him for a while, who he’d loved. Still loved, probably, but differently. As it turned out, there were all kinds of ways you could love somebody, and all of them were allowed.

He picked Stan’s hand up off his lap and held onto it. Stan looked down at their linked fingers and his eyebrows rose; he looked over at Bill with an expression of surprise.

“I don’t know,” Bill admitted, and it felt thrilling to say it, to just admit that he had no fucking idea. He held tight to Stan’s hand. “I just — honestly man, I have no fucking idea.”

Stan’s answering smile was slow and wide. He was opening his mouth to respond when Richie shouted from the back, “Oh _okay,_ so, _Bill’s _allowed to say fuck?”

-

All eight of them stand in front of the porch, staring up at the house. Ben thought about all the years he’d spent as a kid being scared of this place. He felt scared now, too, but in a different way — an angry way, almost. How dare this house tell him that he didn’t love his friends? That they didn’t love him? 

How dare this house hurt Georgie? How dare it hurt any of them?

_Fuck _this house.

“Masks on,” Eddie said grimly, and they all pulled their medical masks over their faces, even Georgie, who wasn’t going in despite his vehement protests. 

Beside him, Mike took his hand on one side and Bev’s hand on the other. Bev linked with Richie beside her, and him with Eddie, and Eddie with Stan, and Stan with Bill, and Bill rested his free hand on Georgie’s head.

“Well pals, if this is it for us, I just wanted to say it’s been a real weird time,” Richie said. He pulled away from them and turned his body slowly enough that his body camera would catch them all. “If this tape is found with my dead body I just want my mom and dad to know that I love them and that it was me and not the dog who broke the ugly antique vase in the bathroom, but in my defense I only did it because Stan wanted me to.”

“No I didn’t,” Stan said quickly. “Maggie, Butterfly, don’t listen to him.”

“Wow. Can’t even use your last words to be honest. That’s a real shame,” Richie told him, and then Eddie gave him a shove backwards and they all dropped their hands. Ben took a deep, bracing breath.

Bev moved to crouch in front of Georgie and pulled one of the fire pokers she’d brought from Mike’s house and handed it to him solemnly. “This kills monsters,” she told him gently. “If you believe it does. Hold tight to it, and use it if you have to. Okay?”

Georgie nodded, then took a few steps backward before turning and going to the car, locking himself inside.

Bev stood, pushing herself up with her hands on her knees, and then cracked her neck on either side. She was brave, Ben thought. She was brave and she was beautiful and he had been right, to call her Embers. He had been right. 

He followed her up and into the house.

In the doorway the handle of his fireman’s axe dug into his shoulder at a weird angle; behind him, Mike reached up to adjust it without Ben needing to ask. He looked over his shoulder to smile at him before remembering he was wearing a mask over his mouth. He wrinkled his eyes instead and Mike wrinkled his eyes back.

_Maybe it _was _thallium,_ Ben thought. Here, in the daylight, the house seemed — so empty. Harmless and tired, like a grumpy old woman who had tired herself out yelling at the kids next door. There didn’t feel like there was anything malicious about it. It didn’t feel like there was anything other than — 

“OH FUCK,” Stan announced, and dropped through the floorboards.

“STAN!” the _Get In _crew yelled all at once, converging over the hole in the floor he’d left. It was — dark, just dark, though Ben knew intellectually that they were peering into the basement. Richie turned on his heel and sprinted back toward the front door and down the staircase, the rest of them on his heels. He was already halfway into the well, his legs in the air, by the time Mike, the fastest amongst them, caught up. 

“STANLEY CAN YOU HEAR ME,” Richie was shouting.

There was no answer. Bill and Bev hauled Richie back out of the well by his ankles, though he struggled against them. “Richie!” Bill was shouting over the sound of Richie’s protests. “Richie! Calm the fuck down! We can’t get him this way, we don’t know how deep it is!”

“What, so we just _leave him?_” Richie shouted back. “What the fuck!”

“We’re not going to leave him,” Bill said, calmer now that Richie was safely out of the well. “There’s got to be a ladder around here somewhere.”

But Ben was peering down into the well. He was thinking about MG&E, and thallium, and why he’d always thought that the poison was in the water. He was thinking that maybe he was right after all, not Eddie. He was thinking that he was a firefighter and he’d been in houses like this before. He knew how they were laid out.

He said, “I have a better idea.” They all turned to look at him, even Richie, whose face was flushed with panic. Eddie had muscled his way to Richie’s side and was holding onto his wrist like he thought Richie was liable to suddenly hurl himself down the well in pursuit of Stan. “I don’t think that’s a well.”

Mike blinked at him. “What?” he asked. “Of course that’s a well.”

“It _was _a well,” Ben agreed. “When it was built. But it’s been years since anyone’s lived here, and the town redid its entire waste disposal system in nineteen eighty-nine.”

Eddie’s eyes lit up with understanding, and his whole expression fell. “Oh _man,_” he whined. “Are you telling me that’s fucking _grey water?_”

“What the hell is grey water?” Richie asked at the same time Ben said: “Yes. It’s not a well. It’s a _sewer. _”

Mike was already moving toward the stairs, nodding. Eddie followed, dragging Richie behind. They didn’t have to go far, just outside and around the back; if Georgie noticed Stan was missing he didn’t say anything from his perch in the driver’s seat of the car. Bill waved at him briefly as they marched past and Georgie waved back. 

At the opening of the sewers, Eddie made another face and a gagging sound. “Oh my god, it’s like, millions of gallons of Derry pee.” 

Richie picked up a stick and dipped it into the water, bringing it up to his nose. Eddie dodged away, behind Ben, as if Ben’s aftershave could protect him from the scent. “It doesn’t smell like caca to _me,_ señor,” Richie announced in a weird and vaguely offensive accent. 

“Okay, I can smell that from _here,_” Eddie snapped. “Have you ever heard of a _staph infection?_ Have you ever heard of _listeria?_”

Ben sighed. He unclipped his axe and handed it to Mike, who took it wordlessly, and then crouched down a little, patting his shoulders. “Come on, Ed,” he said flatly. “Hop on.”

Eddie stilled behind him, which Ben knew meant he was annoyed that he felt babied but that he was also considering it. “Time is short, Kaspbrak,” Mike said without turning around, forging into the dark sewer. Bill and Bev and Richie followed closely behind. Eddie hesitated another second and then hopped up onto Ben’s back, hooking his ankles together.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “I know it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” Ben assured him forging ahead into the dark. “You don’t like germs.”

“Yeah but I know it’s — you know why. We both know it was all bullshit, but I can’t — it’s like. I just hear it in my head all the time, you know? When I’m going to like. Touch a public restroom door handle or something, I can hear her telling me about someone she knew touched a subway rail in New York and they had to amputate his hand.”

“Did that really happen?”

“I don’t fucking know. Probably not.”

From ahead of them, Ben saw the swing of the light from a phone flashlight and heard Bev exclaim: “What in the _sweet fuck. _”

Eddie tightened his grip and Ben jogged to catch up with them, his breath catching in his throat when he did.

The sewers — opened up into a massive cavern. Ben didn’t even know how it was possible this could exist beneath the house without anyone knowing about it, but here it was, huge and decrepit and dripping with something that Ben had absolutely no interest in investigating. The walls were... decorated with graffiti that looked like it was written by someone dipping their hand in paint, sometimes scratching it into the walls: _WE ALL FLOAT,_ it read, and _I’M EVERY NIGHTMARE YOU EVER HAD, _and _DON’T YOU WANT A BALLOON?_ and _YOU’LL DIE IF YOU TRY! YOU’LL DIE IF YOU TRY! YOU’LL DIE IF YOU_ _TRY! _

The last one had cut off abruptly on the fourth repetition, so it just said _YOU’LL DIE IF YOU,_ which Ben somehow found more horrifying than any of the others. 

Eddie’s grip around his neck tightened so much that Ben struggled a little to breathe, but he didn’t shake him off. He found it weirdly comforting.

“Stan,” Bill breathed, and pushed past them all to where Stan was laying, his leg at an odd angle, eyes closed. “Stan!”

When they reached him, Ben realized that Stan wasn’t knocked out. He was awake, breathing shallow, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling, not moving. “Stan,” Bill was saying, hand soft on his cheek. “Stan, buddy. Can you hear me?”

Stan’s eyes darted from the ceiling to Bill and back again, several times.

From Ben’s back, Eddie said, “Oh God. Oh God. Holy fucking shitballs fucking shit.”

With a deep sense of dread, Ben slowly looked up.

-

It was huge, it was a clown, it was a spider, it was a skeleton, it was dripping and also it was wrinkled and dehydrated like a grape, somehow all at once. 

Mike held his breath. He thought maybe he left his body for a second. All of them stared up at it, at It, at — whatever It was, looking down at them from the ceiling with its head at a full twist, mouth stretched wide, teeth out.

_Maybe it’s psychosis,_ Mike thought hopefully to himself, but it didn’t feel like psychosis, it felt real, it felt like he was being watched by something that wanted to eat him. That wanted to crawl all over his body and pick him apart.

“Hello,” the creature said, smiling, smiling. “Look at you. Look at all of you. All together, even here, even in this world, at last.”

“Nope,” Richie said. “Nope, fucking — _nope. _No. Absolutely not. No.”

The creature beamed down at them. “The nothing! The nothing speaks!”

Richie went pale.

“The nothing, and the coward, and the slut, and the tyrant, all here, all here, so good, so tasty and good,” it went on, and Mike couldn’t look away, couldn’t say anything, couldn’t do anything. Could only stare. He felt like all his muscles were atrophied and stiff, like rigor mortis had set in before his heart had even stopped.

None of them spoke. None of them said anything. Then, into the silence broken only by drips of saliva stringing from Its mouth, Bill managed to say, “You hurt my brother, and I’m — and I’m going to kill you.”

It laughed, delighted. “Oh, aren’t you going to try, Bill,” it giggled, and skittered closer to them, snapping its jaws. “You’re going to try so hard and it will taste so good, so delicious! Much better than little Georgie’s arm tasted, yes, much better.”

Bill took a step forward and the thing’s eyes snapped toward him, going bright and yellow. Bill’s jaw when slack and his eyes vague, and Mike thought — he was floating, yes, he was floating up, toward the thing, towards its jaws, and Mike wanted to act, to do something, anything, Jesus, _move, Mike, _he thought, but he couldn’t, he was frozen, all of them were frozen, all of them were — 

“YEEEAAAAUUUGGGHHHHHHHH,” someone screamed, and then Georgie came crashing down from above — from the _well,_ Mike realized, horrified because it was too far to fall, he was going to break — but he landed on the thing’s stomach where it was hanging from the ceiling, Bev’s fire poker driving through its middle, and both of them crashed down to the floor, the yellow light disappearing and Bill dropping back to the ground, collapsing beside Stan.

The creature’s body softened the fall enough for Georgie to roll off and sprint into Bev’s arms. It was screaming. It was — it looked — smaller, somehow. Georgie turned his back to it and was kneeling over Bill, shaking him hard on the shoulder, shouting his name.

“You came back to me,” purred the creature, voice a trill, pulling the fire poker from its stomach and licking the blood off. 

Georgie didn’t turn around. He was still looking at Bill.

“You came back,” It repeated, frowning. “Came to give me the rest of you.”

“I’m busy,” Georgie said without turning around. “I’m not afraid of you. Bill’s here.”

It shrunk again. 

Mike blinked.

He looked over at Ben, who still had Eddie on his back. Eddie wasn’t looking at It. Eddie had his head buried in Ben’s neck.

“Bill can’t save you,” It hissed.

Georgie said, “Of course he can. He’s Bill. Bill can do anything, can’t you, Bill?”

It shrunk, and Mike got it suddenly: It needed them. It needed them to fear it and to run from It, but that felt so stupid suddenly, standing here with his friends, old and new; standing here with Georgie, the best librarian’s assistant that this town had ever seen. Mike was here with people who loved him. Mike could do anything in the world.

Mike said, “I’m not afraid of you,” a nd It shrunk. 

Richie shook his head. He knelt down beside Stan and bent to kiss his forehead. “It’s gonna be okay, Stanley,” he said. “This guy isn’t even good at being a clown. Like, half spider? Come on man. Pick a theme.”

Stan laughed a little, more a huff of breath than anything else, and _It shrunk. _

“Fuck you, asshole,” Bev spit. “You’re the worst fucking clown I’ve ever seen.”

It shrunk, It shrunk, It shrunk, It was screaming, Mike said, “Who even are you? Why do you think you can fucking _hang out with us?_” and it kept shrinking until it was just a small wad of mass, just a helpless crying sack of nothing at all.

And then it was gone.

Georgie, still looking at Bill, his one arm clutching his t-shirt, said, “See? I knew it. You’re the best ghosts hunters in the whole entire world.”

-

“We’re not listening to this,” Bev said flatly. “Richie, I’m so fucking serious, turn it off.”

Richie clutched his phone to his chest protectively, but Eddie reached up from the backseat and snatched it from him, pressing a messy kiss to his cheek as he did. Richie wanted to be mad, but instead he could feel himself blushing like an idiot, which he knew that everyone noticed by the way they pretended not to. “Wow. _Wow. _We see the actual fucking _devil _together but you won’t even listen to like, _one _song from my cover band?” 

“Your cover band is terrible,” Stan informed him without turning around. His foot was in a boot as his ankle healed, resting on Bill’s lap. Mike was in the driver’s seat, because Mike was the only one who knew how to drive the camper van they’d decided to buy when they’d all decided that seven ghost hunters were better than four, and that there were lots of haunted places in the continental United States. They could go to all of them. They could be real ghost busters, together. 

But for now, they were still sitting in Bill’s parents’ driveway as Bev put the last of the camera equipment in the back. 

“Goodbye forever, Derry,” Richie announced cheerfully, flopping back into his seat. “See you never.”

“I don’t know,” Ben said, reaching out to gently run a hand through Bev’s hair. “I just have this feeling that tells me we’ll be back. Maybe for the wedding.”

Eddie frowned, leaning up and over to crane his neck at Ben. “What wedding?” he demanded.

“Yours,” said Ben. “I thought you guys might want to get married at the hotel. Where you met.”

Eddie slapped the back of his head and Richie felt himself go so pink that it was probably singeing his eyelashes. 

“Fuck off,” Eddie said, pulling back to his seat, but he smiled at Richie as he did.

Richie looked around the camper, all of them hanging off each other, Bev with dark sunglasses on like Thelma or Louise as she climbed in and slammed the door. From the front porch behind them, Georgie waved.

“You all in, losers?” Bev asked, and then gave Mike the thumbs up. He put the car in gear and pulled out of the driveway. “Great. Then let’s go fucking ghost hunting.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *jk you can't, dummy!!! it's not a real show!!!


End file.
